


Driving Straight on a Twisting Road

by ficlicious



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Cooking Lessons, Domestic Avengers, Emotional Hurt, F/F, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Torture, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, M/M, Medical Conditions, Mind Control, Misunderstandings, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Rhodey, Rhodey Is a Good Bro, Sentinel/Guide Bonding, Spirit Animals, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark Friendship, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Trauma, Vicious Comments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-16 03:08:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10562451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: She has just enough of a proper Guide left in her to still see auras and spirit animals, and it’s the universe's cruel joke reminding her of everything she's not, and everything she can't have.She's never minded the attention Rhodey's bear has given her. They're old friends, she and it, and she takes comfort in knowing she still shares some part of that with Rhodey.The hawk, on the other hand, just fuckingaggravatesher.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Medie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/gifts), [justanotherpipedream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherpipedream/gifts).



> Becaaaaaaaaause Medie. And also Pipe Dream.
> 
> *Shakes a fist*

A suspicion sneaks up on Clint. 

It isn’t a sudden one, or one he notices is coming before it actually arrives. It doesn’t give him plenty of warning to prepare himself for its arrival. It isn’t a considerate suspicion in the slightest. It’s the sneakiest of all fucking ninja suspicions, one that Clint was happily  _ not  _ entertaining as he went about his daily business and handled his regular shit. 

But then he turned around, and the fucker was  _ there, _ crashed out on the couch in its tightie-whities, scratching its nuts and hogging the XBox in all its loud and obnoxious glory, a thoroughly unwelcome guest he didn’t want but can’t get rid of. 

And it keeps yelling at him that Toni fucking Stark, bristlier than a porcupine and generally more asinine than him on his snarkiest gold-medal day, is his goddamn Guide.

He’d do the dramatic thing, stomp out into some rainstorm with his fists raised to the sky and shout at the universe with whining demands for answers as to _how_ _this is his fucking life_ , but what holds him back is the ball-shriveling terror of possibly getting an answer from the universe that is calm and rational and so logical he can’t argue with it.

And it smacks him in the head, with all the force of an enthusiastic thunder god’s pet mallet, the day the Avengers are called out to deal with a quartet of two-bit losers with the on-the-nose-and-oh-so-clever name of the Wrecking Crew. 

Clint just  _ barely  _ manages to avoid making a  _ Mystery Men _ crack when he finds out one of them actually calls himself Excavator. He nominates himself for the Hawkeye Shiny Star of Awesome Self-Control because he still doesn’t break into hysterical laughter when Excavator whips out a  _ goddamn sparkly shovel _ and comes at him with a war cry that is probably meant to be intimidating but is totally ruined by all the pretty colors glimmering around the blade of the shovel. 

And promptly disqualifies himself from the award for laughing until he’s crying at the comically exaggerated look of absolute shock and dejection on Excavator’s face when the shovel he’s swinging at Clint’s head suddenly impacts against against an outthrust red and gold metal fist  _ and breaks in fucking half. _

Toni finishes swatting aside Shovel Boy’s splintered toy and follows up with an absolutely beautiful punch to his teeth that knocks Excavator onto his ass, down for the count and out cold. She turns back to Clint, and her visor slides up to reveal her completely unamused eyes and school mistress scowl that actually kinda turns him on just a little bit.  

“What the literal fuck, Barton?” she rails, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing. “You wanna be the guy who gets killed by a fucking  _ shovel  _ in a fight with a barbershop quartet of disgruntled contractors, be my fucking guest! I’ll make sure your headstone is vibranium, engraved with the words  _ Here lies Clint Barton, who died because he’s a fucking moron who’d rather laugh than dodge.  _  Just so it lasts forever and future generations can use you as a cautionary tale!”

_ Goddamn, she’s something when she’s that pissed off,  _ he thinks, absently lifts his hand to let the hummingbird flitting around Toni’s head briefly alight on his fingers, and watches her stomp back into the fray, charging full-steam ahead at the Wrecking Crew’s self-professed brains-of-the-outfit, so smart he’s fighting against a woman in titanium who can turn on a dime, with a heavy, unwieldy and awkward wrecking ball on a chain. 

He’s still chortling over the surreal fucking bullshit this fight has turned out to be, when that goddamn hummingbird brushes over his fingertips and a jolt jumps through him like Thor misaimed a lightning bolt. He chokes on his chuckle, and has to cough until his lungs start sucking in air again, because he’s never felt that before, but any Sentinel worth their title knows what it means. And he’s worth his title. 

“Toni,” he croaks, even though he doesn’t have his comm on (too busy laughing, dammit) and she can’t hear him, “how fucking long have you had a hummingbird spirit animal?”

**oOoOoOo**

Toni wishes Clint's stupid fucking hawk would leave her alone. 

It's been eyeing her for weeks, unblinking golden eyes tracking her every movement. It's been following her for days, perching near her to keep watching her closely every time she and Clint are in the same room. Half the time she turns around and there it fucking is, roosting on the nearest thin, branch-like surface it can find. 

She doesn't think Clint is aware of it, because he never seems to see his own goddamn spirit animal. Toni's met more than her share of Sentinels, and she can safely say she is experienced enough to label Clint the laziest, blindest Sentinel in the whole fucking world. 

In another life, his spirit animal’s attentiveness might have been flattering, even welcome. In another life, one where she was still a Guide, might have been worth half a damn, might have had something to to offer a Sentinel of Clint's caliber. 

Any chance she had of living that life, being that Guide, died with her empathic abilities, ripped out with half her ribcage and replaced by a blue rave light and snaking scar tissue that aches in the rain. She has just enough of a proper Guide left in her to still see auras and spirit animals, and it’s the universe's cruel joke reminding her of everything she's not, and everything she can't have. 

She's never minded the attention Rhodey's bear has given her. They're old friends, she and it, and she takes comfort in knowing she still shares some part of that with Rhodey. She takes solace in its presence, likes to pretend she can feel it the same way she used to, when they were a couple of ballsy kids in college banding together in determination to never let some asshole Sentinel screw up their lives. 

So the bear is fine.

The hawk, on the other hand, just fucking  _ aggravates _ her.

She doesn’t leave the tower often. Since she had the brilliant idea to fly through a hole in the sky with a nuclear warhead on her back, going anywhere she can see the sky has been more than a little difficult for her to do. Her breath seizes in her chest and her eyesight blurs with grey polka dots when she gets one glimpse of the endless heavens overhead. Going out in the car is easier, but Happy recently earned himself a promotion to the head of SI security — not that Toni knows how the fuck that happened; she might own the building and theoretically be Bitch In Charge, but she sure as shit isn't anything but flat-out mystified at half the shenanigans that get carried out in her name — and she hasn't found herself a new driver yet. 

Still, she’s agitated enough by the spirit world harassment she faces on a nigh-hourly basis lately, she’d willingly take  _ another  _ nuke into a galaxy far, far away if it just meant she didn’t have to be  _ here.  _ So when Rhodey calls her out of the blue, finally back in the city from wherever the Air Force has him running missions, and asks her to meet him for lunch at their favorite diner, Toni's practically stripped and in the shower before the call is so much as disconnected. 

Once she's through the glass doors at the street level of Stark Industries, however, she wants nothing more than to crawl back inside and hide under her decadent bedspread until the world is facing Armageddon. 

_ Starks are Sentinels made of iron. _

Her father's voice floats from the back of her mind, unwelcome and harsh, and she scowls as she readjusts her sunglasses on her nose and squares her shoulders. “Fuck off, Dad,” she mutters under her breath and, steeling every last drop of dwindling courage she can, steps off the curb to cross the street. 

A furious, high-pitched screech halts her in her tracks, just as she steps into a puddle. There's a rush of feathers, another screech and then a storm of feathers, wings beating her back, talons raking in front of her face. She  yelps and scrambles backwards, hands coming up to protect her eyes, and trips over the curb behind her. To add to her indignity, her ass has barely hit the sidewalk when a car speeds through the puddle, and a wall of water soaks her completely.

She sits in shock, drenched from head to toe in filthy street water, watching the grey droplets fall from her fingers. She looks up, through her sodden hair, over the rim of her askew sunglasses to see the hawk perched on a nearby garbage can, feathers ruffling and eyes unblinkingly watch her. 

“I’m going to kill you,” she hisses.

“Dr. Stark!” The voice and the sound of footsteps jerk her attention from the hawk to glance over her shoulder. Rhoda Freeman, her chief of analytics, hurries towards her, and, even though she’s carrying a tray of steaming coffee cups, holds out her free hand to give Toni help standing. “Dr. Stark, are you alright? God, I could have sworn that car hit you!”

Toni gratefully accepts the help, but does her best to keep from dripping anywhere near Rhoda’s work clothes or her coffees. “No,” she says, disgruntled, and wrings her hair out with a grimace of disgust at how gritty the strands feel. “There was a… wasp. Buzzed into my face.”

“Vicious things,” Rhoda says in sympathy. “You’re okay, though? It didn’t sting you?”

She dredges a smile from somewhere, and half-turns away to shake the water off her hands. Surreptitiously, she eyes the trash can, but the hawk has disappeared again, the sadistic little fucker. “Nothing hurt but my dignity,” she says, gratefully accepting the paper napkin Rhoda fishes out of her pocket, and starts dabbing at her eyes, though it’s probably too late to save her eyeliner. “And I broke most of that ages ago. Thank you, Dr. Freeman. I appreciate it.”

Rhoda hovers a little longer while Toni makes her way back into Stark Industries for one of the several changes of clothes she keeps in her office. She gingerly fishes her phone out of her pocket, but doesn’t bother checking for water damage. It’s not a standard market feature, but her personal Starkphone is completely impervious. She’s tested it in the Hudson. 

“Yeah, hi honeybear,” she says as she stalks through the lobby, ignoring the looks she’s getting, and jabs the button for her personal elevator. “Change of plans. Get my lunch for me, and bring it up to the office. I had a run in with a puddle, and I need to shower New York street sludge out of my fucking hair.”

\----

Toni’s still pissy about the fucking hawk half an hour later, freshly showered and in clean clothes, stabbing at her omelet with her fork. “I think it’s just bored and likes to pick on me,” she mutters, and stuffs a bite in her mouth, chewing savagely.

From the armchair on her right, Rhodey eyes her with an arched eyebrow, spearing gravy-covered fries at a more sedate pace. “I think it’s trying to tell you something,” he says, and starts chewing. 

She snorts, but keeps her eyes on her food. She knows exactly what Rhodey’s talking about, but it’s never going to happen.  _ Ever. _ “Yeah.  _ I’ll torment you until you’re hit by a car.”  _

“And yet,” Rhodey says easily, and steals her root beer while she’s distracted with not looking at him. He grins at her indignant squawk and takes a long swallow, smacking his lips with an exaggerated  _ aaaah!  _ of satisfaction before handing it back. 

“Christ,” she grouses, using the hem of her shirt to wipe the rim of the can, “could you be any more juvenile? I swear to fucking God, Rhodes, if I find backwash in here, I’ll end you in a  _ heartbeat.” _

“I used to hear that six times a day when we were in college.” Rhodey smirks, and laughs at her sneer. “And yet here I sit, still stealing your root beer and talking you down off the ledge of your sorry-ass love life. I think you’re all talk, Stark.”

“There’s no ledge,” she says, rolling her eyes and raising her voice just in case the sixth and loudest time she says it will make it sink in. “There’s no love life. There’s nothing at all to even speculate about, Rhodey.”

From the other side of the chair, Rhodey’s bear lifts his head over the armrest, eyes her, and huffs derisively before it disappears into its comfortable sprawl behind Rhodey. “Even Ursula agrees with me,” Rhodey says, smug and grinning, and drops his hand off the armrest to presumably scratch behind her ears like he usually does. “For every Guide, there is a Sentinel. For every Sentinel, there is a Guide.”

Toni’s stomach clenches, and her throat goes dry, and her eyes want to burn, but she ruthlessly shoves every single bit of  _ that  _ into a tiny ball and stuffs it into the deepest pit in her mind. With all the other times she’s felt this way. The pit’s getting full. “You wanna put it like that?” she snaps, reckless and sharp. “Fine. I’ll put it like this. I’m not a fucking Guide. Not anymore. And good riddance to it anyway. I prefer it this way. No need to worry about when the wrong Sentinel is going to creep up on me and start giving me orders they think I’m obliged to obey.”

Rhodes swallows, ashen and pale, but his eyes are so very gentle and filled with compassion. Without speaking a word, he offers her his hand. She stares at it for a minute, then chokes on a sob and reaches out to take it. Just as quietly, he draws her from her seat on the couch into his lap. She goes willingly, and curls up under his chin, like she used to do in college. 

He smooths her hair away from her face and kisses her forehead. “Healer Wilson didn’t think it was a physical problem,” he says, leans his forehead against her head and strokes his thumb over her cheek. She closes her eyes and burrows in, drinking in the comfort he’s offering. “You might just need more time.”

“It’s been four years,” she whispers hoarsely, squeezes her eyes tighter so she doesn’t start weeping again. “It’s gone. I’m broken. So even if I wanted to … pursue anything, God, Rhodey. No Sentinel deserves a shadow of a Guide.”

She can feel Rhodey’s sigh reverberate through his whole body. “You’re a person, Toni. People don’t break. And even if they did, you’re an engineer. You can put yourself back together again.”

She’s shaking her head before he’s finished talking. She wants to believe it, but she can’t let herself believe it. She tried that, tried hope, tried therapy and hard work. “Doesn’t matter,” she says, clears her throat, and sits away from him. “It doesn’t matter, Rhodey,” she says again, at the disbelieving expression. “I’m fine the way I am. I don’t need anything else.”

He shakes his head slowly, doesn’t take his eyes off her. “Liar,” he says softly, but without malice. “You need to talk to him, Toni.”

“I need to do no such thing,” she says, and slides off his lap to sit on the couch with her omelet again. “Now,” she says in a tone that brooks no argument and forks up more omelet to her mouth, “tell me all about your adventures with Super Sentinel Carol.”

Rhodey heaves another sigh, gives her the disappointed eyes, but launches immediately into telling her all about he and his partner's latest escapades on special assignment with the Air Force. Toni has never been terribly invested in following Rhodey's military career, but right now she has no plans except paying dutiful attention to his every word. 

If only because it will distract her from the silent hawk, perched in the corner on a lampshade, watching her with those goddamn unblinking eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

“You’re starting to lose it,” Natasha says, and holds out his beer. 

Clint eyes her as he takes the bottle from her hand, twists the cap off and plinks it with a flick of his finger and thumb into the garbage can on the other side of the room. “Too late for that,” he says with his cheekiest smirk, and swigs from the bottle. “I lost it a very long time ago. Think it might have been right around the time I met you, actually.”

Natasha withers him with an unimpressed look and settles on the floor beside him, cross-legged and leaning against the bed. “You know what I mean, Barton,” she says, accompanied by the soft, sharp hiss as she cracks the top of her bottle. “Your control, which has never been anything but mediocre at best, has become a shitshow. If Fury knew how often you drift off into fugue—”

“Which he will never know,” Clint says before she can get too far into her lecture, and fortifies with a long, long swallow that feels like searing ice all the way down his throat. He flinches and coughs, avoiding Natasha’s flint-eyed stare, and resolutely sets his nearly-full bottle aside. “Because I’m fine,” he croaks, eyes watering. 

“Uh huh.” Natasha purses her lips and shakes her head, then takes another drink. “You and I clearly have different definitions of that word. Unless you  _ wanted _ to choke on your beer with whatever just happened to your sense of taste. Then again, it’s  _ you  _ we’re talking about here, so I clearly can’t rule it out.”

“Fuck you, Nat,” he mutters, voice gone rough with the freezing in his throat, and eyes her balefully. 

She just quirks an eyebrow, that aggravating little smile playing around her lips. “Not unless you’re hiding a vagina in those tight leather pants.”

“Not to my knowledge,” he says, then tilts his head and considers. “I could check now, if you like, just in case.”

Natasha snorts, nudges him with her toes. “Pig.” She finishes her beer and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then sets the empty aside and reaches for  Clint’s abandoned bottle. “Getting back to your fugue problem—”

“Which I don’t have,” he says with a scowl. 

“— if you don’t want to end up brain dead or in an institution, you need to talk to her,” Natasha finishes, as though he hadn’t interrupted her at all. She pins him with a look, and her expression softens. “I’m starting to worry, Clint,” she says in a gentler tone, and reaches out to thread her fingers through his for a brief squeeze of … support, solidarity? He doesn’t even know what he needs anymore.

_ Your Guide,  _ his brain helpfully supplies.

_ Shut the fuck up,  _ he cheerfully tells it.

He sighs, squeezes her hand back, then scrubs both hands through his hair. “Okay, so I have a few minor—”

“Serious,” Natasha corrects, and matches his dirty look with one of her own. 

“— _ minor  _ episodes with zoning out. I’m still functioning. And the few I’ve had, you got me out of them with no problem.  There’s no need to worry, Nat. I’ll be fine.”

He must have really pissed her off, because that’s the third expression since she sat down that she hasn’t tried to tone down or obfuscate on him. Just like the other two, this one’s full of concern and frustration and disapproval. In other words, her normal expression, only if it was worn on a normal person’s face. “It was luck, not ability, that brought you out of it, Barton,” she says. “I’m not a Guide. And even if I was a Guide, I’m not  _ your  _ Guide. Happy to help and all, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t understand why you’re insisting on my help when you have another option. The  _ normal  _ option, in fact.”

Clint looks away from Natasha, looks down, swallows hard. “That option is not an option,” he mutters, rubs the back of his neck. “Hell, you want the truth? You’re right, okay? I’m not stable and I will most likely go so deep I can’t come back.”

Her fingers slide over the back of his neck, brush through his hair soothingly. “Then talk to Toni,” Natasha says quietly. “She’s hurting too, Clint. She’s hurting a lot.”

There’s a buzz of noise suddenly by his ear, and he glances back to see the hummingbird, red and gold, darting in a tight pattern that somehow looks like scolding to him, just behind him. He smiles at it, because he still thinks it’s the most adorable fucking thing he’s ever seen, so perfectly Toni he should have known from the second he first saw it, then sighs. “And that’s why it’s not an option, Nat,” he says, tired and resigned. “You know what the scepter did to me. I’m too ragged, too torn up. I’ll only end up hurting her more.”

Natasha’s hand goes still, and so does she. “You’re an idiot,” she says, in an eerily similar tone, and her hand drops away from him to swipe across her face. “The point is supposed to be strength in unity. Why is it neither of you can see that just maybe you might not be hurting quite so badly if you acknowledge what you have between you?” 

The hummingbird zips in front of him, and now he thinks it’s agreeing emphatically with Natasha. He eyes it, then deliberately looks away. “Because when has that ever been my or her luck, Nat? When has taking a chance ever actually  _ worked  _ and done what we hoped it would, instead of just bending us over and fucking us harder?”

Natasha tilts her head and shakes her head. “I thought you knew better, Clint,” she says, faintly scathing. “If life’s trying to fuck you, you’re supposed to turn it around and kick it in the balls. And you’re supposed to do it together, because life might recover from one person’s foot, but it’s more difficult to stay standing with a double kick.”

Clint can’t help but laugh, even though it’s subdued, because Natasha’s always had the most fascinating and blunt way of putting things, and it never fails to entertain him. “You assume life comes at us without a cup. Half the time, life doesn’t even need one because it’s gamma-powered and pissed off.”

Natasha glares, then shifts around and rests her head on his shoulder. He sighs and wraps an arm around her, lets his head roll onto hers. “You’re my brother, Clint,” she says, very quietly. “I can’t lose you.”

He rubs her shoulder soothingly, squeezes her as best he can. “I know,” he says, and knows he’s lying when he adds, “I’ll be okay.”

From the rim of Natasha’s discarded empty bottle, the ball of fluff that is the hummingbird at rest eyes him and chirps at him chidingly.

**oOoOoOo**

It’s a standing rule that the Avengers gather for team breakfast on Saturday morning. Beside “kicking alien ass” and “thrashing gods for fun”, eating meals together is their oldest tradition, begun in the aftermath of the Chitauri invasion at that shawarma place before they’d even changed their clothes. And normally, Clint likes them. He gets to be social and stuff his face with food someone made from scratch. What’s not to appreciate?

Oh right.  _ That's  _ what not to appreciate.

They all take turns cooking, two at a time, and Clint stares with a sinking feeling of dread at the schedule held by a magnet to the fridge, because today's cooks are  _ Clint Barton _ and  _ Toni Stark.  _ “JARVIS?” he calls, trying to not let the rising panic drown him.  “Get Natasha on the line.”

“I’m afraid, Agent Barton,” JARVIS replies, “that Agent Romanoff has already seen the schedule, anticipated your most likely response, and asked me to relay a pre-emptive message that says, and I quote, ‘no fucking way, Barton. Wear your big boy pants and deal with it’.”

“Man,” Clint whines. “Sometimes I really hate that woman.”

“If it helps, Agent Barton,” JARVIS says sympathetically, “I don't think she’d take that as an insult. I think she'd find it rather complementary.”

“I know she would.” He sighs, scowls at the schedule again, and gives into the inevitable. “Alright. Fine. Where's Shellhead hiding out this morning?”

“Ma’am is in the workshop,” JARVIS says. “Shall I alert her that you're coming?”

“Why ruin the surprise?” he says as he heads for the elevator. “I just hope she can cook, cos the only thing I can do is not burn the coffee.”

**oOoOoOo**

“Of course I can cook, birdbrain,” Toni says scathingly when Clint poses the question to her, and turns back to start shutting down her work station so he doesn't see the sheer panic flush into her eyes. “I trained with a two star Michelin chef for six months because I wanted to impress Pepper on our first date. I can make anything I want to make, and plate it so it's fit for a king.”

She can hear the grin on Clint's voice. “I thought you gave up on asking Pepper out because she kept saying no.”

“That's beside the point,” she snaps, turns to him with a scowl, and definitely does not look at the hawk preening it's feathers on his shoulder. “You asked if I could cook, not if I'd ever dated Pepper.”

“Fair enough.” He moves from the workbench he's leaning on as she waves him away to start packing up the tools scattered around its surface. “What are you working on anyway?”

Toni glances at him, sees him eyeing a pile of parts piled on the next workbench over. “That? Eventually that will be a new guidance system for the Mark VIII. I'm having trouble with the processing speed requirements for the new circuit alloys, so it's taking a bit longer than I thought it would.”

“Huh.” She chances a quick glance at him, sees him nodding and continuing to look around. “What about that one?” He points to indicate another table, mostly empty except for a disassembled Starkphone and spare components. “Next gen cells?”

“No. That's going to be Thor's, when I've got it hardened and surge protected. He has a tendency to short them out when he gets excited with the lightning bolts. Blondie's gone through three phones already.”

Clint starts walking between the tables, eyeing their contents. Toni folds her arms across her chest, suddenly uneasy, nervous, and she has no earthly idea why. “Widow's Bites?” he questions, tapping a finger on another bench. 

“Natasha's had a few complaints about her current set,” Toni says, and the flutter intensifies. “I told her I'd see what I could do.”

Another table, and the anxiety inches up again. Without prompting, she offers, “Prototype for a recall device for Steve's shield.” Then, “Stretchy pants so Bruce doesn't go balls out when he goes balls out.”

At the final table, the shrieking reaches crescendo, and she steps forward with an outflung hand. “Stop.” There's definitely panic in her voice, enough to turn him back around in surprise, but she can't help that now. She has no good reason for the shakiness, for the dread, for sudden desire to manhandle him out of the lab before he can see what's on his table. It's just there, and it's overwhelming. “It's not… I haven't…” She licks dry lips and swallows. “It isn't ready.”

He moves back towards her with both hands raised peaceably. “Okay, babe,” he says. “You're not doing anything but making me really curious about what goodies you've got in store for me, but hey, this is your space, so I'll be good.”

Relief nearly takes her legs out from under her, but the thought that he might rush forward to catch her, and the last thing she wants is to invite any sort of bond to start forming between them. So she keeps herself from swaying through willpower alone. “You'll get it when it's ready,” she says primly, “and not before. Now come on. We need to get food on the table before the Hulk gets peckish.”

**oOoOoOo**

The yelling is what pulls Steve out of the his post-gym shower, the sound of metal clanging and Toni's voice, loud and strident, barking orders like a drill sergeant, Clint's responding affirmatives a distinctive counterpoint. 

_ We’re under attack,  _ is the first thought that goes through his head. 

He rinses the shampoo out of his hair and gets out of the shower, towels off in a hurry and is still hauling his sweat pants up over his hips when he hits the door release, pausing only to snatch up the shield resting on a stand beside the bed. He races down the hall, barefoot and still damp, mind racing through scenarios and tactics, wondering who’s coming for them now, only to halt in utter confusion at the scene in front of him as he rounds the corner and spills into the shared common space.

Toni, in a white jacket with her hair tucked neatly up into a tight French braid, has a knife in her hand which she’s wielding with frightening speed as she chops green peppers into thin, equal strips. “Where are my onions, Barton?” she yells over her shoulder, without taking her eyes off the silver and green blurs her hands are making of the peppers. 

“Coming, chef!” comes the response as Clint, who is also in a white jacket and for some reason has tied a bandana around his hair, pops up from a crouch by the fridge with a mesh bag of onions in his hand, and scurries over to pull it open beside Toni, rolling an onion into her hand just as she reaches for it. “Back on the bacon, chef?”

“Yes, back on the bacon,” Toni snaps, and the blade singing into the onion ends in a thwack as the edge meets the cutting board underneath. “It isn't going to cook itself. And I want  _ chewy,  _ Barton! None of this black-char shit you tried to pass off on me already.  _ Chewy. _ ”

“Yes chef!” he says, and hops to the stove to man the frying pan. 

Steve just stands there, blinking and dripping, trying to wrap his head around what exactly he’s looking at. The kitchen is a cacophony of noise and smells, things sizzling and being chopped or diced, frying onions and bacon and fresh bread vying for dominance in his nose, Toni yelling and Clint agreeing with whatever she’s telling him to do. Just for a moment, he has the crazy thought that perhaps he’s not in the right universe, that he woke up in an alternate dimension and is only now noticing it.

“Don’t overthink it, Cap,” Natasha says, and he jerks his attention to the left. Natasha and Rhodes have taken up residence on the couch, each with a stemmed glass of orange juice in their hands, and a bowl of grapes on the cushion between them. “Just come sit,  have a mimosa, and enjoy the show.”

“Who needs  _ Hell’s Kitchen  _ when you can watch it unfold in real time?” Rhodes adds as he unfolds himself to shift over and make room. “Cap, seriously. Toni’s already thrown a bag of frozen hashbrowns at Barton. Get your butt over here before she catches sight of the shield.”

Bewildered and not quite sure what the neighbourhood has to do with anything that’s going on, Steve moves over to the couch, slides the shield behind it, and sits on the cushion Natasha moves the grapes from for him. “We’re not under attack?”

Natasha laughs. “That depends on your definition of  _ attack. _ Rhodey, you’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?” 

“Hell yes I am,” Rhodes says with a broad grin, and sips his mimosa. “And it’s damned beautiful. You gonna help me keep it going?”

“Hell yes I am,” Natasha replies, and crosses her legs at the knee, as Toni erupts into a tirade in a language Steve thinks is Japanese, waving a spatula under Clint’s nose. 

“I don’t understand a goddamn word you’re saying!” Clint yells, waving a wooden spoon back at her. “Yell at me in English!”

“Just perfect,” Rhodes sighs contentedly. “And about damned time.”

Steve looks between Natasha and Rhodes, who both look smug and happy and some kind of conspiratorial, then sighs and reaches for the pitcher of orange juice on the table to pour himself a glass. Just one more thing for him to not understand about the future, he supposes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may watch a few too many cooking shows.


	3. Chapter 3

“Under no circumstances,” Natasha says, eyes following Toni around as she pinballs from one end of the common area to the other, angrily gesturing as she rails about no one telling her she needs a date into the phone at Pepper, “is anyone going to be available.”

Rhodey, likewise following Toni with lazy swivels of his head, just grins. “She’s not going to like that. I’m usually on standby for last-minute functions.  It’s our arrangement. I have a special set of dress blues in a bag in the closet here, just in case I’m needed.”

“So make something up. You’re not available tonight. You have to be back on base. An old friend is in town. You need to Skype your girlfriend. It’s easy.”

“For you maybe.” He shakes his head and side-eyes her. “I don’t lie to Toni, Natasha. Not for anything. Besides,” he says with another easy grin, “I like wearing my blues.”

Natasha gives him a withering look. “Fine. You have plans tonight,” she says flatly. “If you want to wear your blues so bad, you can take me to dinner. There. You now have a prior commitment. No lying required.”

Rhodey blinks. “Uh… I, uh…”

She arches an eyebrow at him, hiding her amusement behind a stone expression. “Problems?”

She wants to laugh at the awkward, twisting expression on his face, a clear indication he’s trying to phrase this as delicately as possible. “You’re aware I’m a dude, right?”

“It’s been brought to my attention.”

Rhodey coughs, flustered. “I was under the impression dudes weren’t your thing.”

He’s adorable. She’ll never tell him that, but she thinks it nonetheless. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility of there being a ‘dude’ I could tolerate long enough to date.” She shrugs. “Let’s give it a shot, see where it ends.”

“See,” Rhodey says, sitting upright and leaning towards her, “that’s the thing. You fucking terrify me, Natasha. You are one scary, stone-cold lady. So when you come out of left field with words like ‘date’ and ‘shot’ and ‘end’, I can feel my testicles trying to retreat into my body for safety.”

She can’t help it, it’s so unexpected she actually laughs out loud, real and delighted. “That’s a good start,” she says, and pats his cheek. “That’s a really good place to start.”

**oOoOoOo**

“I,” Toni says, when her tirade against Pepper’s tyrannical decree that she not show up without someone who can keep her under control has wound to a natural conclusion, “need some arm candy. So Rhodey, go get dressed, honeybear. I’ll do my hair and makeup, shimmy into my tightest, slinkiest, reddest dress, and we’ll get Happy to bring the car around.”

Natasha knows Toni hasn’t registered Rhodey’s rueful, apologetic headshake, and smirks at Toni’s back as she’s heading for the elevator to the penthouse. “Sorry, Tones,” Rhodey says. “I have a prior commitment.”

Toni halts mid-step, turns around with the world’s most baffled expression and tilts her head. “Well, uncommit. We have a deal. You can’t leave me to the mercy of Pepper and the Conservative Caucus of Creepy Crones!”

Natasha arches an eyebrow at Rhodey, who glances nervously at her . It’s not often she reaches for intimidation tactics this early in a relationship, but Rhodey has a notorious weak spot for Toni, who is pulling no punches with her very best puppy-dog-eyed look. Rhodes visibly swallows, and looks back at Toni. 

“Tones, I can’t. Would if I could, but it’s kind of a life and death thing.”

“Oh.” Toni’s face falls a mile. “Military shit?”

“Yeah,” Rhodey says, nodding emphatically. “Let’s go with that.”

“Well, fuck,” Toni says, exasperatedly throwing her hands in the air. “If I show up alone, Pepper will have me muzzled and handcuffed to the oldest, most boring attendee she can find. I am severely disappointed in you, honeybear. Who the hell am I going to find at the last—”

Her eyes focus on Natasha with a speed and intensity that’s enough to take even Natasha aback, and Toni beams brightly. “Hey Nat,” she says, friendly and conversational. “You doing anything tonight?”

Natasha smirks. “I’m not being your on-camera bi-curious phase, Stark. Find another sucker.”

Toni whines faintly. “But I made you those riot sticks with the tazer in the tip! Doesn’t that buy me any good will?”

“Sure,” Natasha says, gives her the dangerous smile, the warm and polite one that never fails to unsettle  _ anyone  _ who sees it.  “It bought you the goodwill you then spent when you ate my last slice of cake yesterday.”

“Goddammit,” Toni says, after taking a wary step backwards. “My sweet tooth gets me every time.” She sets her hands on her hips, looking very put out. “Shit, who’m I going to take then? Bruce won’t ever risk bringing the Other Guy out in public. Thor’s in Asgard. Steve’s not only in England visiting Aunt Peggy right now, he’s also a very bad idea.”

“Terrible idea,” Natasha agrees, and so does Rhodey a moment later, after she elbows him into agreement. “Who does that leave?”

As if conjured by the Asgardian in charge of cues too good to pass up, Clint shuffles into the room, looking fresh out of gym in iPod, sweats and a wifebeater, donut in mouth, soda in hand, and a bag of chips under his arm. 

Natasha is proud, oh so very very proud, of the unholy glee that lights Toni’s face up. She’s even prouder of the speed with which Toni bounds across the room. “Clint! How pretty do you clean up?”

Clint blinks at Toni, slowly takes his earphones out, slowly removes the donut from his mouth. “What?”

“I said…” Toni’s sigh is exasperated. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. We’re in a time crunch. You’re not busy tonight, right? Hot date with Netflix, maybe, but otherwise free?”

Uncertainly, Clint looks over Toni’s shoulder at Natasha and Rhodey, and Natasha gives him a sharp smirk. “No, I’m free. Why?” 

“You own a suit? You know what, that doesn’t matter either. I can have a suit tailored for you in under thirty minutes. I have a guy.” 

He looks back at Natasha, wide-eyed and completely confused. “Little help?” 

Before Natasha can do more than laugh and point, Toni’s got him by the front of the shirt, leading him back down the hall with the bewildered look of a lost sheep. 

“I’ve been where that man is standing,” Rhodey says in sympathy. “He does not know what he’s in for. Toni is an unstoppable force of nature when she’s in these moods. He’s going to be fit to stroll down a catwalk before he can even figure out why he’s in a tux to begin with.”

“He’s a big boy,” Natasha says dismissively. “He’ll be fine. I’ve seen him in a tux. Toni’s not going to have much ability to think about anything else, so that’ll settle her down too. Honestly, you should be more worried about where you’re going to take me to dinner, Rhodes.”

And that’s the nice thing about being her, she decides, watching Rhodey’s face melt into stunned panic. Not many people know how to turn someone’s schadenfreude inside out, but Natasha could teach the masterclass in the technique. 

\----

When Natasha gets in from her dinner with Rhodey — a black-tie classy French place where Rhodey shamelessly namedropped Toni to get a private dining booth for the two of them — it’s more properly early morning. Despite herself, and surprising herself to boot, she actually had a good time. She still hasn’t decided if she’s interested enough for a second date, but the first one was, all in all, completely enjoyable.

The TV’s on in the den when she pads by in her stocking feet, shoes dangling from her fingers, and she pauses to peer around the dividing wall, then smiles. If she was the kind of person to coo over completely adorable things, she’d be doing it at the sight of Toni and Clint on the couch.

What’s more impressive, at least to her, is the fact that they’re both wearing their comfort clothes, jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt for Toni, track pants and a SHIELD-branded hoodie for Clint, sound asleep amid the detritus of a junk food binge, heads tipped together.

Carefully, she sets her shoes and purse down on the floor and creeps quietly towards them, pulling the warm duvan off the back of the unoccupied couch and shaking it out to spread over them. Neither of them stir, not even Clint, but then again, she is very good at not being noticed. The TV’s only showing the gentle reminder for Netflix’s insurance purposes that they should examine how much time they’re spending watching, so she kills the console and the TV before leaving. 

She pauses after picking up her shoes and purse again, and smiles softly at the scene again. “If you fuck it up,” she says very quietly, and she’s not sure if she’s talking to Toni or Clint or both of them, “I’ll bury you in New Jersey.”

**oOoOoOo**

The weirdest part of the last few weeks isn’t that Natasha’s dating Rhodey, or that he seems to have grown on Toni practically overnight — a feat he thought beyond human possibility, since he assumed she hated him on first sight. It’s that he hasn’t had a zone-out since the night Toni dragged him by the scruff of the neck to the charity gala at her mother’s foundation.

Granted, he hasn’t been trying to focus one of his senses on anything in particular, which may have something to do with it, but even the unintentional slips he’s been suffering… They’re all gone, as if they never were. 

And the awesome part of the last few weeks is spending time with Toni. Whether it’s the bond between a Sentinel and a Guide, or two people who just  _ really  _ get along, Clint’s enjoying the hell out of it. 

Even when he finds her in the kitchen, stress-baking cupcakes to get over a nightmare, at two in the morning, and sits up with her (mostly so he can lick the bowl, but whatever). Even when she’s across the room, or in the workshop, or yelling at him in however many fucking languages she’s studied cooking in. He’s enjoying the hell out of all of them. 

Still, as fond as he is of his recently-oodlesque time with Toni,  he needs space to think, consider if he actually will say anything to her about being his Guide, if he wants to tell her about Loki and the scepter, and all the things it fucked up in him. If he wants to do anything at all. 

Hard to find a quiet spot to do that, unless  one’s the only bowman on a team. So he does what he always does when he can’t sleep and needs to think: packs up his shit, and heads to the archery range.

The sound of arrows sinking into targets is a siren call to Clint, and also just maybe a tiny bit of territorial possessiveness. He's the archer on the team, and the range is his, more or less. No one should be down here at any time of day, let alone five in the morning, because no one ever is. This is his turf, and invaders make him twitchy.

But all the lights are on, so someone's home. Someone who's not supposed to be here. 

He pulls in a deep breath, exhales slow and quiet, then slips his bow out of its case and eases the door further ajar with his bow down but ready. Edges around until  he can peer inside, see who’s intruding.

And promptly forgets how to breathe.

Because it's Toni.

It’s Toni, in jeans and that purple shirt he lost on laundry day forever ago, hair tied back and smartglasses on her nose. Toni, with archery gloves and a bracer, with a quiver over her shoulder and a gorgeous bow in hand, focused intently on the target at the end of her lane.

Toni, who's mocked him on more than one occasion about his eleventh century technology, who's never so much as hinted she's touched a bow outside her workshop in her life…

But there’s no denying the evidence in front of his eyes. 

Toni's an archer.

Toni’s an archer with smartglasses. 

And holy fuck, is she  _ hotter than hell. _

He silently slips through the door and leans against the back wall to watch her shoot. She's not going to be qualifying for Olympic teams any time soon, but her stance is clean, her shoulders are where they should be, and the swing of her arm over her shoulder to draw out her next arrow between her forefinger and middle finger is smooth, confident, assured, more than competent. 

And the fact that she’s doing it all wearing  _ his  _ shirt, with  _ his  _ gear, is more than enough to make him harder than theoretical mathematics.

He must make some kind of muffled noise, a grunt, a groan, because Toni jumps like someone fired a gunshot, bow up and arrow nocked, and it really shouldn’t turn him on even more to have his own arrows pointed at him, should it?

He straightens from the wall, hands spread in front of him. “It’s just me, Toni,” he says, takes a couple of lazy paces towards her when the bow lowers and she pushes her glasses up into her hair.

“It’s the ass crack of dawn,” she says, flushed and flustered, and nervously rakes her fingers through her hair, dislodging the glasses, which she scrambles to catch before they hit the floor. “No one's supposed to be here at the ass crack of dawn.”

“That was my thinking too,” he replies, jerks a thumb over his shoulder, and her eyes skip past him briefly to where he left his bow and quiver. His mouth is more than a little dry as he looks her up and down. “That's my shirt.”

She has a tell, though he's pretty sure she'd deny it with her dying breath. Her eyes dart up and then down, and she licks her lips before looking up again. All sure signs she's about to play the innocent, claim to not know what he's talking about. But she shocks the shit out of him when she bites her lip and says, “Yeah, it is.” Her hands go to the neck of the shirt, curl lightly around the fabric, and he couldn't move if someone put a gun to his head. “Want it back?”

The air whiffs out of him with a startled grunt, and he has the sudden notion that this is what a heart attack must feel like. “It looks better on you than it ever did on me,” he says, and resists the urge to reach out, help her pull it off, and see how good it looks on the floor. “I didn't know you could handle a bow.”

She rolls her eyes and tsks. “Just because I didn't stop at the Dark Ages for my signature weapon, birdbrain, doesn't mean I'm not competent with the technology. Besides, how can I ensure I'm not giving you faulty goods unless I personally test them?”

Well that tears it. He's never going to be able to use his bow ever again without thinking of her hands on the grip, and embarrassing himself. “Your form needs some work,” he says, husky and low. “Want a few pointers?”

If he had any sort of doubt at all about her interest in him, it is utterly put to rest by the hitch in her breath, the flush in her face, and the dazzled, dazed sheen of her eyes. “Private lessons from the world's greatest marksman? What girl could resist that?”

**oOoOoOo**

This is a very bad idea. It's a trainwreck in progress, but Toni would have an easier time shifting the moon in its orbit than stop this from happening. She's done her very best to avoid the hell out of this moment, but here she is anyway. She's done her very best to keep her hands to herself, to avoid even the most casual of touches from one of the handsiest fucking people she's ever met, and it's killed her to deny herself even that much. 

She's not good for him, not wrecked and broken like she is. This is going to cause them nothing but pain and ruination when all is said and done. She’s done a lot of selfish, stupid things in her life, and this, she knows in her bones, is the most selfish, stupidest thing she’s ever going to do. 

She just can’t stop herself anymore. 

Every brush of his fingers over her skin, making tiny adjustments to her stance, lifting her elbow just a fraction, lowering her head for a better line of sight… Every single touch is a white-hot brand that wakes her nerve endings, sings in her blood, calls out to the tattered remnants of the Guide she once was. The hawk flits in and out of her vision, a ghostly afterimage with streaks of red and gold around it, and the tension between them is thick enough to see as motes of light, heavy enough to taste on the back of her tongue like her favorite coffee. 

And it  _ hurts _ , because this is how she used to see the world and everyone in it, and she knows it’s not going to last. It can’t last, because it’s no longer within her. But this thing, this inexorable thing, has too much momentum now, and she’s not even sure she would stop it if she could. Everything in her is alive, singing, moving, and she’s  _ missed it so much.  _

Their slow dance around each other was always meant to come here, with their breaths harsh and ragged, him against her back, so warm and slotted against her so perfectly she doesn’t know why he hasn’t always been there, one hand on her hip and another lightly supporting her elbow as she releases the arrow. It doesn’t even matter if it hits the target or not, it’s lost all importance to her, because the only thing she needs to do is lower the bow and turn in the circle of his arms to face him. 

There’s something wondrous and indefinable in his expression, the look of a man seeing something amazing for the first time, and his hand lifts from her hip to cup her cheek. “Toni,” he breathes, raw and pure, and bends his head towards her as she tilts hers up to him.

“I am terribly sorry to interrupt,” JARVIS suddenly says, and the loud, unnaturalness of his voice coming out of the walls slams into Toni like a wave of ice water, and she stumbles away from Clint, heart pounding, breath fast and ragged. “Thor has returned from Asgard. Captain Rogers wishes everyone to join him in the conference room in order to discuss Thor’s news.”

She stares at Clint in wide-eyed horror, her stomach yawing open into a black pit as it dawns on her just how very close she came to permanently fucking up his life. And Clint stares back at her, the bewildered, shocked look of someone suckerpunched by the last person he’d ever expect to hit him. She opens her mouth, frantically searching for something witty, quippy, bullshit to take the edge off this, blunt the damage it’s done, but nothing comes out but a quiet, broken-hearted whimper. 

She rips the glasses off her face, slaps them and the bow into Clint’s chest, and runs from him like her life depends on it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pretty rough chapter, emotionally. Mean and vicious things are said, misunderstandings abound, misery is rampant. 
> 
> I don't know that I'm 100% satisfied with the pacing of it, but I don't want to add more, and I don't want to cut it at an earlier point to leave it on a more terrible note. Enjoy, if you can.

It takes a long few minutes for Clint to compose himself after Toni leaves him in the range, mostly because he’s not quite sure what the fuck just happened. 

Half of him is screaming at him to chase Toni down, finish the first step of the bond, pull her back into his arms. The other half is screaming at him in shock, because he’s never been that close to a bond, never felt something half as transcendental as he knows that moment they shared was. Never had it torn away as fast as it formed.

The dissonance leaves him frozen, like he was just dunked in an ice bath, trying to remember how to breathe and clutching the slick new bow and its linked smartglasses in a grip gone white-knuckled. 

“Fuck,” he breathes, shaky and disbelieving. On legs that feel as steady as a newborn foal’s, he makes his way to the door, sets the gear aside with his other things, and leans heavily on the wall as he continues down the hall towards the conference room. 

Thor’s back, he notes distantly, but his eyes are for Toni, who’s already taken a seat between Rhodey and Bruce. He’s on autopilot as he sinks into the chair beside Natasha, and mops his face with both hands as he tries to catch Toni’s attention. 

Toni steadfastly refuses to meet his eyes by keeping hers locked on Thor. 

A hand sliding over his briefly makes him jump a mile, and he turns to look at Natasha, who’s eyeing him back with a concerned frown. “Everything alright?” she asks quietly. 

He shakes his head, knows he’s shaking it too fast, can’t stop himself. “I don’t know,” he says, and the sound of his own voice, lost and bewildered, makes him wince, snaps him back a little into his own head. “I don’t know,” he repeats, and glances wide-eyed at Toni, then back at Natasha. 

Her lips thin and she shakes her head faintly, but is prevented from continuing the  conversation by Steve standing up from his seat at the opposite end of the table and clearing his throat.

“We’ll talk after,” she promises in an undertone, and the only thing that gets him through the meeting is the steadying touch of her hand on his. 

**oOoOoOo**

There’s an ugly, hollow place in the middle of Toni’s chest, a quiet, dead spot that tries to strangle her with its emptiness. She doesn’t know how she’s breathing past it, but her chest keeps rising and falling in a regular rhythm, so somehow she’s managing. 

Thor’s news is not good, but she can barely concentrate on it either, can’t feel anything except Rhodey’s hand, tightly squeezing hers under the table, because everything else is numb. She doesn’t look at him, can’t look at Clint, refuses to look at the hawk lurking in the corner of her vision, just above Steve’s head. She doesn’t look anywhere but a spot she picked somewhere over Thor’s left shoulder and fixated on.

God, what was she thinking? What did she nearly fucking do?

Thor’s speaking gravely, full of serious looks and dire baritone rumbles, but it’s all distant noise, a jumbled cacophony in the background, underscoring the endless loop her brain is chasing around itself. There’s something about Loki’s scepter, and Heimdall and SHIELD — or maybe not SHIELD but  _ a  _ shield, she can’t fucking concentrate enough to parse the words in context — and she knows it’s bad, knows Thor and Steve and everyone else needs her at her sharpest, her cleverest, her most brilliant, but  _ she can’t fucking think  _ past the guilt and shame. 

Bruce’s hand touches her leg, and she nearly leaps out of her skin, but Rhodey’s on her other side, her grounding point of contact. She turns shocky, shaky attention to Bruce, and his eyes are so kind and warm, creased with genuine concern, enough that it forces her stalled-out thoughts into a breakpoint, into a reboot sequence.

She sucks in a breath, then lets it out and says in a tone so normal it shocks the shit out of her, “Sure Cap. Bruce and I tracked the thing once before, and that was without all the goodies I have tucked away in my labs. We can do it again, no sweat.”

And she blinks, because apparently she’d been following the conversation after all. Christ, she’s a fucking mess. 

“I’ll adjourn the meeting there,” Steve says firmly, and nods to Thor. “We’ll find the scepter, wherever it’s been hidden. Avengers, we’ve got a mission. Let’s get it done.”

Toni stays seated as Steve and Thor stand, as Natasha moves in front of Clint, as Bruce starts to get on his feet beside her. She blows out a shaky breath, squeezes her eyes shut and grits her teeth.  _ C’mon, Stark. Focus. You’re better than this.  _

Rhodey’s hand is joined by his other one, and his skin is warm and soothing against her palm. She looks up at him, and feels her eyes fill with tears at the gentle, protective, love in them. “You gonna be okay, Tones?” 

She’s not going to look at Clint. She refuses to look at Clint. “No,” she says, low and pained. “But I’m gonna have to be.”

Rhodey sighs, then leans in and kisses the tip of her nose, a rare public gesture of affection that makes the ugly, empty place in her feel a little less empty, a little less ugly. “I got your back, Toni,” he murmurs, and briefly presses his forehead to hers. “I just wish the person who’s most often stabbing it wasn’t yourself.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says, with absolutely no conviction, and reluctantly lets him let go of her hand as he stands. She sighs, rubs briskly at her face with both hands, then pastes on her very best almost-real smile and turns to face Bruce. “I’m all yours, Banner,” she says. “Let’s go track us a goddamn scepter. Again.”

He protests constantly that he’s not that kind of doctor, but he never can help the gleam of professional concern that sparks whenever he looks at an injured Avenger. Most of the time, Toni thinks it’s kind of endearing, but right now, she wants it pointed anywhere but at her. “You sure you’re up to it?”

She scoffs, even though she would love nothing more than to say no and go crawl into a workshop lockdown engineering binge until Clint’s safely bonded to a real Guide. “Jolly Green, I’ve yet to reach the limits of what I’m capable of being up to. Revisiting algorithms we’ve already programmed is hardly going to tax my grey matter.”

Bruce doesn’t look convinced, but bless him, he doesn’t look like he’s about to protest either. “If you say so,” he says mildly, and makes a short sweeping  _ after-you  _ gesture she’s more than happy — she might even say  _ frantic —  _ to oblige. She’s almost home free, almost able to retreat into computers and search parameters, puzzles and problem-solving, almost able to forget about the hawk and the archer, almost there, two more hallways, almost safe...

“Can I borrow you for a moment, Bruce?” comes Natasha’s smooth question, and the next thing Toni knows, Bruce has disappeared from her side with a startled blink, and a stone-faced Clint has replaced him, and the hawk is eyeballing her from his shoulder.  

She swallows hard, and her hands start shaking as her mental picture of safety and sanctuary evaporates like mist in the backwash from the hawk’s wings. Oh, fuck.

“Can we talk?” Clint says evenly, and it’s not even remotely a question. 

“We don’t have anything to talk about,” she says, thanks whatever lucky stars she hasn’t yet burned out that her voice is coming out normal and steady. 

“ _ Bullshit _ ! You can’t tell me you didn’t feel that, back at the range. You can’t tell me you didn’t run the fuck away from it.”

Her teeth click together and she fights the urge to flinch back, because he’s angry and has every right to be, and she knows there isn’t a thing she can say to change any of that. All she wants to do is go back to the range, before JARVIS interrupted them, before common sense slapped her in the face, and just stay there. But that’s not an option. It never was, and she should be grateful the interruption came before she couldn’t take it back. 

She scrambles for her armor, the tattered, fragile, oh-so-thin facade of Toni Stark the Queen Bitch, drags it desperately around her by tilting her chin up and fixing him with a challenging stare. “So fucking what?” she says, waves a hand dismissively, wants to break down into tears at how readily he reels back like she physically struck him. “We had a moment, but it’s over now. And really, that’s for the best. You and me? We wouldn’t work, not for any length of time. I’d get bored, you’d get bored, and then where does that leave us? It’s for the best if we just go back to barely-speaking teammates who know nothing about each other.”

Suspicion chases furious hurt through his eyes, and she digs her nails into her palms in fists by her sides, lets the bite of pain chase the urge to break down and explain herself away. “You know,” he says, and every word is sharp enough to cut her to ribbons, “as well as I do that you’re my Guide. Whether or not you believe in all that one Sentinel, one Guide, soul-to-soul destiny crap, I know goddamn well you felt the pull as strongly as I did. So what the hell, Stark?”

Warm wetness blooms in her palms, and the tang of blood hits her nose as she inhales sharply. There it is, the unacknowledged elephant in the room, tap-dancing in a tutu now, not ignorable any longer.  _ Yes,  _ she wants to cry.  _ I’m terrified,  _ she wants to tell him.  _ I’m too fucked up for you,  _ she wants to admit. But none of those options will do anything but bring this clusterfuck back to a place she simply can’t let it go. 

“I’m not interested in a bond,” she says instead, channels every drop of the ice queen she’s cultivated for protection, channels every haughty thought and microexpression she can dredge. “The last thing I need is to be trapped in a relationship that’s doomed from the start. I may be in the business of fixing things, Barton,” and the bitterness has crept in, no stopping it, “but sometimes people break, and sometimes those broken people aren’t worth fixing.”

His face goes pale and he steps back, wide-eyed and so miserably  _ injured,  _ so thoroughly  _ betrayed  _ it’s breaking her heart. “Jesus, Stark,” he says, wondering and venomous. “I thought maybe they’d carved your heart out from under the arc reactor and that’s why you were such a bitch, but now I’m pretty sure you never fucking had one to begin with. No wonder you’re alone. Who could fucking stand you?”

His words are hammer-blows, sledgehammers smashing into wounds that never fully healed, that barely scabbed over. But Toni Stark doesn’t cry. She doesn’t show weakness. She doesn’t retreat, or surrender. She fights as viciously as she’s fought. Her chin tips up another few notches. “I’ve never needed anyone,” she says, cold and hard, and dying inside.  _ Go away, because this is killing me. This is fucking killing me, Clint. Just go away and be happy with someone who can give you what you need.  _ “I certainly don’t imagine  _ you’d  _ be the exception to that rule. Did you think you would be? God, that’s sad.”

He shakes his head, eyes not leaving her, and backs away again. “Do the world a favor,” he says, and now he sounds more exhausted and resigned than furious and hurtful. “Just do the world a fucking favor and crawl back into whatever hole you slithered out of. I’m done with you.”

She sags against the wall as he walks away, and there’s blood in her mouth from how hard she’s biting her tongue. The cave looms, dark and cold, in the back of her mind, the hole she slithered out of years ago. He’s right, in a way. She shouldn’t have left it. She wasn’t meant to leave it. In all the ways that matter, that’s where everything that was good and whole within her died. Maybe she should crawl back into it. It  _ would _ be doing the world a favor. 

First things first, though. Thor needs her help, hers and Bruce’s. Deliberately, carefully, she pushes herself off the wall, gathering all of her wild thoughts and shrieking, scattered emotions, and tucks them into the dark places in her mind, locks them all cautiously away one by one until she can stand straight, until she can move without falling, until she’s sure she can speak words without collapsing into tears. 

She can get to slithering once Thor’s got the scepter in hand. 

**oOoOoOo**

He shouldn’t be out here, and he knows it. He just doesn’t give a fuck anymore. 

They’ve hit six bases this week, cleaned out six HYDRA nests and been rewarded with the frustration of knowing their targets were here days, maybe hours, before the Avengers raided the place. The scepter’s been dancing out of their reach for three weeks now, and no matter how hard they strain, none of them can put so much as a fingertip on it. 

_ It’s probably Toni’s fault,  _ he thinks, mean and petty, and hates himself for it in the next moment, almost as much as he hates her in the first. If she was doing her job right, he wouldn’t be out here crawling through the world’s filthiest vents, trying to get intel on the base’s movements and patrol schedules on the off-chance that  _ maybe  _ the scepter hasn’t been spirited away yet.

He’s sick of this shit. Sick of her shit. Sick of everything. Once this job is over, he’s decided, he’s going back to SHIELD to—

“ _ -ton. Barton! Answer me!” _

He bites back a curse as Steve’s voice pulls him back into the world around him, cautiously inches back into the vent he’d been about to fall out of. “Must’ve hit a dead spot,” he mutters, knows Steve knows he’s lying his ass off, doesn’t care about that either. “Won’t happen again.”

Steve’s sigh through the comms is as faint as it is resolute. “See SHIELD medical when we’re done here,” he murmurs. 

Clint scoffs. “I’m fine. Not zoned into a coma yet. Just let me do my fucking job.”

There’s a long silence, long enough that Clint finds himself starting to drift off again, hearing dialing up to extra sensitivity in case he can catch the scuff of a boot heel, or the tap of a pen against a desk top, or anything else that might indicate this is anything but another goddamn dead end. “Anything moving on your end?”

“Just me and the dust bunnies,” he says, and edges down the shaft as carefully as he can. “Hang on. I think I see something. Let me just…”

“Clint, don’t.” Steve’s voice is calm, but underneath that calm there’s panic and worry and a whole other bunch of nuanced things Clint doubts Steve even knows he’s expressing. “You’re risking too much. Let me get to you first. I can ground you, make sure you come back in one piece.”

_ I don’t have anything to come back to,  _ he thinks bitterly as he swings himself out of the ceiling and into a shadowy corner. He lands in a crouch and squints down the hall, to where he thought he saw a blue glow, jacks his sight until it’s as good as the hawk he named himself after, until he can make out fuzzy shapes in the pitch black five hundred meters away. “Got ‘em,” he whispers, straightens slowly from his crouch. “Quadrant eighteen, section seven. There are three of them. One of them’s holding the scepter. It’s here, Cap.”

“Stay where you are.” Steve’s voice is unnaturally loud, and Clint winces at the volume of it, pries the comm out of his ear, lets it drop on the ground. “I’m going,” he says, or thinks he says, and snaps his bow to full extension as he steps out into the hallway. It’s reckless, it’s stupid, but he’s so goddamn tired of waiting for this to be done. He wants it to be done so  _ he _ can be done.

It’s reckless. It’s stupid. He’s fuguing in and out again. He shouldn’t be here, and he knows that. And he thought he didn’t give a fuck, but as he looks up into the smiling face of a man holding the scepter out towards him, a man who he blinked and found in front of him because he’s losing time, stupid, reckless… 

He finds he very much  _ does _ give a fuck, but now it’s too late because the point of the scepter touches his chest, and a horrifyingly familiar, soft, muffling blanket settles over his mind like it never left.

**oOoOoOo**

Steve is in the room when Natasha arrives, sitting beside Clint's hospital bed still in full uniform with the cowl pulled back. She hardly spares him a glance as she hurries in, all attention focused on the clipboard hanging on the end of the bed, because if she looks at Clint before she can better prepare herself, she's going to start crying. 

Black Widow doesn't cry. Not even if the only family she has manages to get himself compromised for the second time in six months because he has a death wish. Black Widow premeditates murder when that happens.

“I don't know how it happened,” Steve says, unprompted, and Natasha jerks her head to look at him. He's paler than usual, exhausted and worried, and is twining his fingers around themselves in his lap, staring blankly at them. “One minute, he's relaying information on patrols and layout, and the next he's shooting at me.”

Natasha pretends not to see the way her hands are trembling, rattling, against the clipboard. “Not your fault, Cap,” she says, knows she's clipped and angry, but that can't be helped. “This is all on him.” She sighs, slaps the file closed because the information is just upsetting her more and more with every line she reads. “And it's on me too,” she adds, breaking on the last syllable. “I should have told you he wasn't fit for duty. I knew he wasn't. And I said nothing.”

She buries her face in her hands and breathes slow and even, reaching desperately for the emotional control that comes so easy to her, but is escaping her grasp now. She hears Steve stand from the chair and approach, and then his broad hand comes to rest on her shoulder. “I don't think we have time to assign blame,” he says gently. “We should focus on how to help Hawkeye. We can worry about who's at fault for what later. Right now, he needs us to do what we do best, and help him.”

She nods shakily, takes a deep, fortifying breath, and lifts her face from her hands. “Have any Guides tried to bring him back?” 

“We all have. Even paired Guides. No one can reach him.” Steve's eyes close briefly. “I couldn't reach him. Wherever he's gone, I think only his true Guide is going to be able to find him. I just don't know how much time we have to find that Guide before it's too late.”

Natasha’s breath catches in her throat, and for a moment she can't breathe at all. Of course. If only she had stopped to think before rushing out to fret at the idiot's bedside, this would all be over by now. 

If she’d done what she wanted to do weeks ago, this never would have happened in the first place. 

But that, she’ll deal with later.

“Natasha?”

She lifts her eyes, meets Steve's concern with hard resolve. “No need for a lengthy search, Cap,” she says. “I know exactly where to find her.”

**oOoOoOo**

When Steve and Natasha show up in her workshop unannounced, grim and smelling like hospital antiseptic, the bottom drops out of Toni’s stomach. Both of them look so distinctly unamused and worried, she can practically feel it rolling off them in waves that only churn her constant nausea, and she swallows down the taste of bile. Whatever news they have is dire, and she suspects she’s going to want to give it her full attention, so she turns back to her console and saves her work before waving it into sleep mode. 

She  twists her hands together, clasping them tightly together before separating them and shoving each into a pocket. Her shoulders are so tight she’s losing feeling in them, but she’ll deal with that later. “What happened?”

For a moment, she doesn’t think Natasha’s going to break stride, and Toni has the vivid impression that she will, in fact, stomp Toni into the ground if she has to. Thankfully, she stops six inches from Toni, pins her with a hard stare and says bluntly, “Clint’s comatose. He needs his Guide,  _ you,  _ or he’s dead.”

Every word, every syllable, crashes into Toni like an avalanche, breaks through the hard glass shell she’s wrapped around herself, and floods her with  _ guilt  _ and  _ shame  _ and  _ pants-wetting terror _ . She staggers backwards, catching herself on the edge of the table and trying to remember how to breathe while the world reels in a drunken spin around her. 

Distantly, like through a glass pressed to a door, she hears Steve’s voice burst with an astonished, “Wait,  _ Toni’s  _ the Guide?”

The shock and surprise in his tone slaps her in the face, and her lungs abruptly reinflate. “Oh god,” she breathes, and Natasha lunges forward to support her as sudden, violent tremors threaten to take out her knees. “What do I do, Nat? Tell me what to do.”

Natasha’s eyes bore into hers, and despite the trembling, Toni feels steadier, firmer, more resolved. “You get over whatever bullshit you think is more important than him, then you get your ass to the hospital,” Natasha says, hard and clear as a diamond, “and then you bring the fucking idiot  _ back  _ so I can kill you both myself.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by copious amounts of Linkin Park, sleep debt, and prototype-in-resolve unexpectedly perking me up exactly when I needed it. 
> 
> Cheers to summerpipedreams, as always.

If she'd known going to the hospital with Natasha would have meant Steve eyeballing her in disapproval the whole time, Toni might have told Natasha to stuff it, she'd walk. She's already edgy and off balance, and the last thing she needs is Admiral Perfect Abs silently judging her like his opinion is the only one that matters.

She side-eyes him, and the frank disappointment in his expression really isn’t helping her tension levels. Her shoulders tighten more with every second that passes without him asking the burning questions she knows he has on the tip of his tongue. Just as she’s a hair’s breadth away from screaming in frustration, he clears his throat and folds his arms across his chest. “Can I ask you something, Toni?”

“I can’t exactly stop you, Steve,” she replies, and it’s far sharper than she intended it to be, and it’s only making things worse because his eyes narrow oh-so slightly around the corners and his lips tighten. Too late now to take it back, though.

“Exactly what did you hope to accomplish by letting Barton fall into a coma?” he asks, so evenly she’s impressed despite herself. “If you’re his Guide—” and his clear disbelief tells her just how much he’s buying into it, “—you’ve had a responsibility and a duty to him since the moment you realized you were a matched pair. Shirking it isn’t just selfish and cruel, it’s tantamount to criminal neglect. You’re a smart woman. What’s the benefit to you?”

Her back teeth are grinding together by the fourth word, and by the time he’s talking about her shirking her duty, her hands are fisted so tightly her nails bite into her palms deep enough to draw blood. Deep, wounded, indignant rage rises fast and hard, so fast and so hard it momentarily steals the breath from her lungs, and through the haze over her vision, she sees Steve flinch violently back, eyes widening in startlement.

Only one explanation for that. Either he’s actively seeking her emotions with his Guide abilities, or she’s projecting past his shielding. _Good,_ she thinks viciously, digs deep into that well of hurt and anger, and her thoughts sharpen into razor arrowheads, and Steve’s face goes white with pain. _Let him feel it. Let him feel all of it._

She takes a breath in the next moment, and wrestles the urge to hurt him _down,_  locks it back into the deep, black parts of her mind where it belongs. The effort takes more than it should, and she’s just tired when it’s done. “Not all of us are Captain America,” she says, hollow and drained. “No matter how hard we try, we can’t all be the perfect, shining example of a Guide, Steve. You know shit about me, and even less about my life. Leave me the fuck alone.”

She jerks her attention to the passing scenery outside, staring hard at it like there’s a pop quiz at the end of the ride, but she can’t register any of it. Landmarks slide out of her recognition like water and smoke, because all she can see and all she can hear is her father’s disappointment in her, echoing up from those same dark places she stuffed her rage down into. All she can see is the shock and betrayal on Clint’s face, the hurt and scorn in his voice.

She only registers the car’s stopped when a light touch on the back of her hand abruptly snaps her back to the here and now, and she jumps halfway out of her skin, has her hands instinctively up to fire repulsors that aren’t there before she realizes it’s only Steve. Her eyes skitter back and forth for a moment, registering Natasha standing outside the car a short distance away, registering the parking lot around them, the hospital looming above them.   

Her shoulders go tense as coiled springs again and she glares silently at Steve, defiantly, willing him to say something else. But he just regards her steadily, then turns her hand over and slides his forefinger and middle finger over her wrist’s pulse point, with the rest of his hand loosely cupping her palm. And her breath seizes again, balling into a lump of hard, hot tears in the back of her throat, because that’s how he should have greeted her, how she should have greeted him, the first time they met, Guide to Guide.

“I’m sorry, Toni,” he says quietly, and she hesitantly uncurls her hand from its fist to return the respect. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have assumed anything. I’ll do whatever I can to help. Whatever you need.”

It takes her a couple of tries to speak past that fucking lump in her throat. “Support,” she says, hurried and irritatingly ashamed to ask for help. “I just need support.” Her eyes dart to the window again, and she winces at the distinctly annoyed expression Natasha’s wearing. “And maybe keep Romanoff from killing me.”

“I will do my very best,” Steve says solemnly, and squeezes her hand with the kind of comforting warmth that makes her think for just a second that this isn’t going to be a total shitshow waiting to hit the fan.

\------

If not for Steve’s sudden outflung hand, the sight of Clint motionless and silent, hooked up to machines Toni couldn’t identify right now if her fortune was on the line, would have dropped her to the floor. She reels on knees gone watery, clutching Steve’s shoulder to keep her balance, and feels all the blood drain from her face.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she breathes, finds her center of gravity again and lets her hand drop away from Steve’s arm. “What happened?”

“He was angry,” Steve says, and she senses more than sees him follow her as she crosses the room to clutch the side rails of the bed. “Reckless. He went too deep into focus, probably his hearing. He wouldn’t wait for me.” He hesitates, and shakes his head when she glances over her shoulder at him, then sighs and scrubs his face. “It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I’m pretty sure we are completely incompatible, because I couldn’t even reach him a little.”

Toni blinks at him in shock, because that should be impossible. She’d certainly been expected to live up to Steve Rogers, the Ultimate Guide, bonded to his best friend but able to step in for any Sentinel in trouble. A tiny, distant, mutinous part of her mind wonders what Howard would think of _that,_ but she squashes that before it can summon the resentment and dark glee threatening to stir.

“I’m barely a Guide,” she mumbles, and her eyes drop involuntarily. Defiant satisfaction is always easier to crush down than her own self-doubt and insecurities. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

She’d forgotten Natasha’s presence, but is abruptly reminded when she looms into Toni’s field of view, stopping just short of touching her. Toni flinches instinctively back anyway, because she doesn’t need her long-dead empathic abilities to read the rage and fear and worry and blame screaming from every line of Natasha’s posture and expression. “You don’t have a choice,” she says, enunciating her words with precision, so they snap crisp and sharp in Toni’s ears. “We’ll all get around to blame-throwing and I-can’ts later, I’m sure, but right now, you shut it down. You shut it all the fuck down, and _find him_.”

She bites back her instinctive indignant response, swallows it down, because she knows Natasha’s right. She may not have directly come out and said _this is all your fault, Stark,_ but she wouldn’t be wrong if she did. So instead of answering Natasha’s righteous anger with her own belligerent snark, she bites her lip instead and nods slowly. “I will,” she says softly. She doesn’t add _or die trying._ What’s the point in stating the obvious to the person who’ll probably be doing the killing?

It takes more strength than she knew she had in her to turn around again, because that’s the first step in the process. She's done this in theory. The knowledge is rusty but definitely in her memory, lessons from her childhood as the first Guide in the Stark line, a disappointment to her father who expected a Sentinel but demanded she excel no matter the circumstances. She had the best tutors, the best instructors, if only to maximize her worth to the parade of potential Sentinels Howard marched past her before she fled to MIT.

She knows what to do. She knows how to do it.

She's just terrified of doing it, because this is the first step in a series of steps that makes them a permanent fixture in each other’s lives.

Before her courage, or strength, or leg sturdiness, can fail her again, she shrugs out of her jacket, toes off her sneakers, and slides up onto the bed with him, straddling his legs and thumbing the switch that raises the head of the bed until he’s practically upright.

“Okay,” she breathes, and shakes her hands, flexes her fingers. Can't look away from his slack, washed out face. Can't stop the nausea and dread from churning in her gut. “Okay.”

Four times, she starts to reach for Clint's head, settle her hands on either side of his face for the necessary physical contact, but jerks her hands back before she gets close. Her whole body is shaking, a leaf in a hurricane, and panic chokes her throat. “Shit,” she mumbles, grinds her hands into her eyes. “I can't do this.”

A warm, broad hand settles on her shoulder, too broad for Natasha. She whips her head up, and Steve smiles down at her, faint and confident. “You're Toni Stark,” he says gently. “You can.”

“I'm afraid,” she says before she can stop herself.

“I know,” Steve says, and his hand tightens in comfort and solidarity. “But when has that ever stopped you?”

Maybe it's just his words, maybe he's doing some sort of soothing Guide shit to her, but whatever it is, it's taking the edge off the paralyzing fear. She takes a deep, long, shuddering breath, lets it out slow, and squares her shoulders. “Okay birdbrain,” she says, and slides her hands over Clint’s jaws, shifting her fingers to the proper points of contact. “Here goes nothing,” she mutters, then closes her eyes and tilts her forehead until it’s resting against his.

For a long moment, there’s nothing. No rush of memories, no slurring of sounds and colors. For a long moment, she hangs on a spiderweb of tension and doubt.

Then she exhales a shaky breath, and falls forever into a blue void.

\----

Voices and sensation rush around her, a maddening cacophony that surges in her thoughts and tries to break her apart.

Almost, it succeeds.

Almost, it rips her into tatters.

Almost, she lets herself tumble into fragments and fractures, crumble to dust in the angry tornado around her.

If it had been just her on the line, she might have let it. But she's not doing this for herself. She's not the only one at risk. If she drifts into chaos, Clint's lost too, and that… that is unacceptable.

 _Every mind has its defenses,_ Aunt Peggy says from the depths of her memory. _Every mind tries to protect itself from intrusion. The kinds of protection a person employs are unique to that person's experiences. All you can do, Toni, is try your best and adapt yourself as you can._

She doesn't have a body here, not in this chaos, but she steels herself and forces one to coalesce, forces the mindscape to conform to her will. Ground flickers beneath her, fading in and out as she battles with Clint's mind, battles with herself, screaming with the effort of pulling herself back together one tattered ribbon at a time. The chaos does not subside quietly; it fights her efforts to impose order and sense, slips into cracks of her doubt and denial with scalpels of blue lightning to slice what's left of her resolve to shreds.

 _I need armor,_ she thinks desperately, and throws her half-formed arms wide, drags up the memory of falling from the top of Stark Tower and submerges herself in it, remembering how it felt. The delicate weight of the bracelet on each wrist, the scream of the wind deafening her. The shining armor opening around her before it seals her in securely.

Her HUD lights up in front of her eyes, and as the ground rushes up towards her, she rights herself in a midair flip and comes down in her three point landing so hard, she punches through the bedrock of his mental defenses and drops straight into the Chitauri invasion.

For a long, sickening moment, she thinks she might vomit at the sight of the hole ripped in the sky, because her stomach lurches and bile rises in the back of her throat. For a long sickening moment, she’s floating in space again, dying in dead armor, falling out of forever towards earth.

 _It’s not real,_ she thinks, doesn’t believe herself, swallows hard and deliberately turns away from the nightmare overhead to let herself fall again. _It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real._

One of her instructors, she can’t remember which, warned her that flying in mindscapes was a difficult skill to master, and she shouldn’t expect to be able to do it the first time she found herself in someone else’s mind. But flying is a part of her, instinct and muscle memory, and just because this isn’t a real sky doesn’t mean she forgets how to move in three dimensions. It's an idle thought to imagine her jets and stabilizers kicking in, effortless to summon the exhilaration of defying gravity and apply it to her thoughts. Her armor is an extension of herself, and inside Clint's head or not, she will never lose that.

She takes a moment to orient, because Manhattan is different here, colored through Clint's perception and experience. Buildings are in sharper relief, colors brighter, more vivid than she's used to seeing. Motion slurs in streaky blurs, dizzying and disorienting, and she has to close her eyes against the onslaught. _Jesus, is this how he sees the world all the time? How does he stand it?_

It occurs to her that maybe he doesn’t have a choice, because she hasn’t been there for him, and guilt crawls uncomfortably up her spine. _Not now,_ she tells herself, finds a reference point — Stark Tower, always her go-to — and adjusts her mental map until she knows where she is and, if her memory is correct, which rooftop she’ll find Clint perched on.

She hears him long before she sees him, his voice crackling over the comms to tell her she’s got strays behind her, her strained response that she’s just trying to keep them off the street. A moment later, a red and gold figure streaks by, weaving in and out of buildings, ducking under a parking garage as six, seven, eight  — _Jesus,_ had she really had so many behind her? — Chitauri speeders explode against the facades around her.

She knows what’s coming next, and has no desire to ever see a space whale try to eat her alive again. “Where the fuck are you, Barton?” she mutters, twists into a rolling bank and dives for the rooftop he should be, but isn’t.

“Where you left me,” he replies. “I understand memory is the first to go when age starts creeping up, but I didn’t think you were quite that decrepit yet.”

“Oh bite me,” she says crossly, then blinks and pauses in mid-air, frozen in the shock of realizing that little exchange is brand new, not part of his memory, or hers. “Clint,” she says, wary and thinking furiously, “can you hear me?”

“Kinda hard not to,” comes the response, and her heart leaps into her throat with the kind of expectant surge she’s come to recognize as an approaching eureka moment. “Sounds like you’re yelling in my ear. Is there a way to turn these comm units down at all? Not that you don’t have a lovely voice, Stark. You’re just loud as fuck.”

And like a strike of brilliant, fucking _brilliant,_ lightning, the moment unfurls in her mind like it's accompanied by triumphant trumpets. “What you should be doing,” she says, strives as hard as she can for the soothing-yet-resolved tone Rhodey's so good at using on her, “is listening to my voice. Focus on it. Hear nothing but me.”

“I don't understand,” he says, sounds confused and suspicious, and she prays like she's never prayed before that the fact the scene around her is going dim and foggy means he's doing what she's telling him to do.

“Clint,” she says, and knows she's nailed the right tone when he sucks in a sharp breath. The name echoes strangely, like she's saying it twice, and there's a weird sensation of being here, and being back in the hospital room at the same time.  “Listen only to my voice. Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he says again, distant and distracted. “I can hear you.”

“Good. You're doing good, Clint.” She closes her eyes, because everything has gone dark and there's nothing to see, so she shuts out the distraction of nothingness to focus solely on him. “Hear me, and follow me back. Can you do that? Can you follow me back?”

“Yes,” he says, and this time, she hears it with two pairs of ears, real and metaphysical. Behind her, muffled and smothered, is a faint noise like someone making a startled sound, and another shushing them sharply. “I'm here.”

“Good. Really good, honey.”  She opens her eyes again, habit more than anything else, and everything around her has shifted. Clint's in front of her now, so close she can smell his aftershave, the faint scent of his soap and shampoo under it. Then there's a hand on her back, and she's got one hand on his shoulder, the other in his free hand, and they're dancing slow and formal, a glittering display gleaming amongst the pale shadows of the other couples swirling around each other on the dance floor.

The night of the ball. She swallows hard, because unlike that night, when all he did was look at her with a soft edge of wonder and a champagne flush high in his cheeks, his eyes are closed and his face is ashen. “What are we doing here, Toni?”

It's on the tip of her tongue to tell him it's his memory and she's not in control of the shifts of it, but she chokes it down, afraid it'll undo the tiny amount of progress she's made. “Never mind that,” she says firmly, and calls up her own memory of that night, focuses on the smells of him, of her vanilla bean perfume, from the same set as her shampoo and conditioner. She pictures herself daubing it behind her ears and on her wrists. Wraps them both in a cloud of it, light and teasing, until the shadowy dancers have disappeared behind it.

She knows she got it right when his face animates, and his mouth curves into a smile, and he breathes, “Vanilla. You always smell like vanilla.”

“That’s right,” she says softly as they dance on. “Can you smell it now? Focus on the scent. Can you smell it?”

“Yes,” he replies after a moment’s hesitation, and his voice has that dreamy, drifting quality again, resonant and echoing. “I can smell it. I can smell you.”

He spins her out as the music swells, so fast vertigo blurs her sight for a moment. When it passes and the smeared colors resolve, she’s chopping onions at the kitchen counter, with pots rattling and bacon sizzling on the stove behind her. It only takes her a second to adjust, which means she’s either getting adept at changing gears abruptly, or she’s going crazy so madness and chaos make sense on a visceral level. If she’s being honest, it’s probably a little bit of both. She has never been the most stable to begin with.

“Barton,” she says, and it snaps out like a whip.

Clint pops up from where he was crouched by the fridge. “Yes chef,” he replies immediately, holding up the tomatoes he’d apparently been retrieving from the crisper. She has to clutch the counter to keep her knees from sending her to the floor, which is getting to be an annoying reaction. But his eyes are open and clear, focused on her with an intensity that turns the blue of his irises deep and bright. He stops, blinks, shakes his head as confusion crosses his face once more. “Toni? What are we doing?”

If she concentrates hard enough, she can see a doubled image, one superimposed over the other: him in the kitchen staring at her, and him with his face framed by her hands, staring at her. “I said never mind that,” she replies with a smile that’s a bit too sobbingly relieved to be a proper smirk, no matter how hard it tries. “Now who’s memory is going with age?”

He sets the tomatoes carefully on the counter, never breaking eye contact. He’s gone neutral and watchful, the kind of expression he wears when he’s working out the physics of his next shot in his head. There's _awareness_ in his eyes, awareness that has been missing until now. “You’re guiding me out of an overload coma.”

“Yes.” She tilts her head, keeps her eyes on his. “Is that a problem?”

What little she could read from him, not that there was much, abruptly shutters off. “That depends,” he replies. “What will you do if I don’t want to come out of it?”

She snorts, can’t help it, because it’s them and she’s her, and she knows what’s likely to happen if she comes out of whatever this memory jaunt is without him. “Then you better make room in here, birdbrain. I’m not facing Natasha all by my lonesome. She’ll have my hide made into a new pair of boots if I open my eyes and you don’t.”

His smile is grudging, but she doesn’t care. She’ll take it for what it is. “Sounds like her,” he says. He’s quiet for a moment, just watching her, and she waits because she’s pretty sure he’s working himself into saying something he’s reluctant to say. Finally, he sighs, scrubs the back of his hair with a wry grimace. “You know what you’re doing here, Stark?”

She knows exactly what he’s asking. She doesn’t want to answer it, so she pretends to misunderstand. “Well, so far I’m rocking a three out of five. That’s sixty percent by my math, and if I recall correctly, that’s bare minimum pass. So yeah. I think so.”

She should have known he wasn’t likely to let it go. He frowns, his smile turning upside down. “I meant—”

He snaps his mouth shut when she raises a hand to forestall him, and she shakes her head slowly. “I know what you meant,” she says. “But maintaining this connection while I’m still conscious is kind of exhausting, and I’d really like to get it done before I collapse.”

“Fine,” he says, tight and unhappy. “But this conversation isn’t over yet. I can see you. Here and... there, I guess. Wherever _there_ is.”

Toni arches an eyebrow, crosses her arms and pulls up Aunt Peggy’s disapproving scowl. “A hospital room, dumbass,” she says. “You knocked yourself out but good. Are you sure you can see me?”

“I can see you,” he murmurs, _here_ and also _there,_ and Toni sighs quietly in relief. He offers his hand, and she takes it without hesitation. He spins her into his arms, and her vision goes dim. When it brightens again, her free hand is wrapped around the hilt of a bow, and they're at the range with early morning silence all around.

Her throat works and she stares mutely up at him, and she can distantly feel her physical self shiver as his hands lift from the sheets on his hospital bed, slide up her back and splay against her shoulders. “I can feel you,” he murmurs, a hair's breadth from her mouth.

Her breath hitches in her throat, in both places, but it doesn't really matter because she can't tell what's real and what's in their heads anymore. "Remind me who's supposed to be the Guide again?” she croaks through a throat gone dry, and his laugh is as musical as it is tinged with bitterness.

“I thought you had no interest in forming a bond,” he says, encircles her with his arms and then she's flush against him.

The bow drops out of her hand, dissipates before it can clatter to the floor and the dreamscape tightens until it's just the two of them in darkness. “It's complicated,” she whispers, desperately wants to pull away, but thinks it would be easier to walk to Asgard than separate from him now.

“Life is complicated, Toni,” he says, and the dark around them brightens with an insidious blue light that chills straight down her spine. He looks up, looks around, and what color had returned to his face washes abruptly out again. “Case in point,” he says, rough and afraid.

Out of the blue glow comes Loki, striding towards them with his scepter in hand and a triumphant smirk spread across his narrow face. “This is where your ride ends, Princess,” he says. “Your Sentinel is _mine._ ”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This went places I did not intend it to go, but hell. When have my fics ever been as short as I said they'd be?

For a moment, Toni can’t breathe. Loki? Here? Now? Is it really him, or is it a memory of him? She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know how to figure out which it is. 

“It’s time to come home, Agent Barton,” Loki says, and holds a hand out to him. “She doesn’t want you. Leave her now and come back to me.”

Clint isn't looking at her anymore. His attention is completely on Loki, and his grip around her waist is starting to slip. Panic surges, brings bile with it, a sour taste in the back of her throat. “That’s not true,” she says, but it’s weak even to her own ears.

“Isn’t it?” Loki says, cutting and smug. “I don’t want a bond,” he says, but it’s her voice, cold and arrogant and cruel, coming out of his mouth. “And even if I did, did you think it would be you, Clint? God that’s sad.”

She flinches, but hangs onto Clint tightly as he violently recoils from her. “No,” she says urgently, scrambles around in front of him, between him and the Devil, and slides her palms over his jaws. Forces his head back to her, drags him down until their foreheads are touching. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a liar.”

“He’s right,” Clint says, toneless. “You said that.”

She squeezes her eyes shut in guilt. “I did,” she says, soft and miserable. “I shouldn't have. I didn't mean them. I was trying to drive you away, and I went too far. Way the fuck too far, and I'm so sorry, Clint. I'm really fucking sorry.”

“Maybe you were right,” he says, detached and distant, and his skin feels like cold stone beneath her palms. “You said it would be doomed from the start because sometimes broken people aren't worth fixing. This is why I'm broken, Toni. Maybe you should just leave me here.”

She bites back the urge to retch as sick terror and ashamed yearning crash into her stomach, and it takes her a long moment to realize that it's coming from Clint, who’s staring at Loki with the sort of desperate fixation junkies wear. “Oh fuck,” she breathes, eyes widening and horror spreading like poison through her chest. Because only now is she realizing the awful horrendous truth of the scepter’s power. “Oh my god, it made you feel like you had a Guide bond.”

“Yes,” he says, horribly hollow. “And it ripped me apart when the connection broke. Tore me to shreds, ruined my control. It's been slowly killing me ever since.” He licks his lips, eyes haunted and wanting as they stare over her shoulder. “God, I want it back,” he whispers hopelessly. 

“You don't need it,” she says, steady and firm, finds the Guide intonations and lays them on thick. “You don't need it. I'm here, Clint. We're one tiny step from forming it. Feel me. Hear me. See me. I'm here. You don't need it. You have me.”

His eyes clear of the dreadful fog, and focus on her again. “You don't want it,” he says, but there's a hint of doubt now, and his hands hesitantly settle on her hips. “You don’t want me.”

“I do,” she says, takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “Christ, Barton. I’ve never wanted anything more.”

He’s so terribly tense beneath her fingers, and she can feel it vibrating through his shoulders and arms. “Then why…”

“It’s complicated.” Honesty this raw and personal is a foreign concept, because she’s survived by keeping the most vulnerable parts of her obfuscated and hidden, but she’s out of choices, and she’s out of time. “But mostly because I’m afraid. I’ve never allowed myself to be this close to anyone, not since… I’m afraid of being hurt again. I’m afraid of what it might do to me, and to you.”

“Toni, look at me.”

She forces herself to open her eyes, tilt her chin up, meet his gaze. 

He lifts a hand from her waist, cups her cheek, brushes his thumb gently over her skin. The tenderness in that simple gesture shakes her to the core. “I don’t want to hurt you. I wouldn't hurt you deliberately. You can trust me.”

“I know I can,” she replies, but can't force the words  _ it's me I don't trust  _ out of her mouth _.  _ “Look,” she says, throwing a glance over her shoulder at the Asgardian and that fucking scepter. Loki's closing in on them and even though it's not really happening, she knows their time is running out. “Either you come out with me, or I move in with you. Your call. You gotta make it now.”

“I choose you,” he says immediately, and the way it lights up his face, the brilliance in the smile, the brightness of his eyes… it does stupidly gooey things to her heart, and she hates herself just a little for what she's going to end up doing to him.

He deserves better than a broken Guide, but maybe a broken Guide is far better than a false one.

“Good,” she says, and goes up on her toes. “Focus on me. How I smell, how I feel, how I sound, how I look, how I taste. Focus only on me and I'll bring you home.”

“I don't know how you taste,” he says.

She smiles in return. “I'm getting to that,” she murmurs, and kisses him. 

For a moment, everything stops. In the silence, in the stillness, her lips brushing his as light as a butterfly, he stares at her with wide eyes. The chill that never leaves her heart deepens just a little, because this is the moment where she learns once and for all if she still has the ability within her to bond. 

For a moment, nothing happens, and despair surges because this is proof, the final proof, that she’s damaged beyond repair. But then Clint shudders all over, his eyes close, and his hands plunge into her hair and then he’s kissing her back, with desperate need and frantic roughness.  

Loki howls, and the world shudders and splinters around them, and from a long way away, the musical shattering of glass or crystal echoes. A warmth blooms in her chest, a pinpoint of heat deep in the center of the empty, cold place, and she gasps as it explodes like a star, radiating out at the speed of thought to set fire to her blood, her thoughts, her soul.

Awareness floods into her with a painless jolt, and she makes a startled, breathy noise against his mouth, because  _ he’s there,  _ a tight, bright, warm knot of emotions and thoughts and sensations filling up the void, burning away the cold. _ He’s there, _ and she can feel him there, burning with desire and flooded with relief and awed with humility that she chose him after all.

“I don’t deserve you,” she murmurs when they break apart, breathing ragged and harsh, leans her forehead against his and runs her hands over his shoulders. 

“My call to make,” he says hoarsely. “And I say you do. Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

She lifts her head, opens her eyes, finds herself back in the hospital room still sitting on his legs, but he’s awake, alert, exhausted but back where he belongs, and she shivers at the gentle stroke of his fingers across her face. “Yes,” she says, even though doubt is eating her alive.

His smile is heartbreakingly happy. “Stay with me?”

“Of course.” She's lying through her teeth, she knows she is, but she lets him drag her down and tuck her in beside him, lets him turn her breathless with slow, lazy kisses. She doesn't mean to, but she falls asleep in his arms, with her face tucked into his neck and his arms holding her secure and safe.

\-------

The hallway is long and warm and bright, practically glowing in the pure white emanating from somewhere overhead, and everything has an otherworldly sheen she learned a long time ago to associate with walking between other people’s dreams. She opens a doorway that gleams with blue, serene light, and steps into the dining room of a large, boisterous, happy family at Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a shine to the scene, tinged with sepia, like a photo from a long time ago. 

At the head of the table, an old woman, face lined with pain,  sits in a hospital gown, tubes and wires snaking from her arms and under the gown to the machinery behind her. But her eyes are clear and her smile is beatific when she meets Toni’s gaze and says, “I’m ready to go home. Are you here to take me?”

She’s beside the woman without moving, and she lays a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not that kind of Guide, Dorea.” The name comes instinctive and intuitive. “Good journeys.” 

The woman sighs, and her smile turns wistful. “I’m tired of waiting,” Toni hears her say as the dream hazes out into another door.

“I know,” Toni says softly, and bites her lip as she steps through the portal and onto a highway slick with rain and darkened by midnight. Metal screeches and glass shatters, and she kneels down to the bleeding man sprawled on the asphalt at her feet. He doesn’t look up when she lays a hand on his head, gently smoothing his soaked, grimy hair back from his forehead. “You’ll be okay,” she says. “Your husband knows you didn’t mean any of the things you said. Arguments happen, Seth.”

“I should have been more careful,” he whispers. “I just want to make it up to him.”

“You will,” Toni promises. “Stay strong.  He’s waiting for you to wake up. He needs you, you know.”

“I know,” Seth murmurs as Toni stands up again. “I need him too.”

Midnight gives way to a bright day as the door appears, and Toni passes through it to find herself standing beside a kid with a black eye, nasty scalp wound, and a broken arm in a sling, standing in the shade of a tree under a kaleidoscope sky. 

“Oh my god,” the girl squeals, and throws her one good arm around Toni, who blinks in shock and hesitantly hugs her back. “Thank you for inviting me, Miss Stark! I couldn’t believe you did! It was only a cat in a tree, and I totally fell out of it without getting the cat, but you invited me anyway!”

“It was pretty brave, Kamala,” Toni says, but something’s definitely wrong here. Not frightening or dangerous, just… distinctly  _ not right.  _ “You deserved to be recognized for it.”

“I know, but  _ your wedding.  _ Celebrities have been literally fighting each other over invites, and you gave one to  _ me! _ ”

Toni blinks, and the detached serenity she’s been wrapped in cracks in the surrealness of this conversation. “My what.”

“And Captain Rogers looks so  _ handsome  _ in his dress uniform!” Kamala squeezes Toni and sighs happily. “It’s just like in my fanfics.  This is the best day of my life.”

A hand drops on her shoulder, and she turns around to see Steve, too bright, too polished, too clearly idealized, in an army dress uniform with a cap tucked under his arm. The next thing she knows, she’s bent backwards over his arm as he dips her, staring intently into her eyes. “Are you ready to become Mrs. Captain America?” he says in a low, intense, suggestive tone, and before she can do more than squeak at the suddenness, his lips are on hers and Kamala is cheering in the background. 

She jerks awake, bolts upright so fast she disturbs Clint’s deep, coma-like sleep, and slaps a pillow over her face to muffle the harsh, heavy almost-screams as she tries to catch her breath, so he can settle back down again. “What the fuck?” she pants, eyes wide and heart racing. “What the actual fuck?”

\-------

She hasn’t been able to dreamwalk since Afghanistan, thought it was lost with the rest of her Guide abilities when her time in hell broke her to pieces. But once she manages to calm her shrieking nerves and surging adrenaline into something approaching normal for her, she lies awake next to Clint and stares unseeingly at the ceiling. 

She can feel people, their wants, desires, passing thoughts, desperate and powerful emotions, surging and ebbing around her like a goddamn ocean. An ocean she used to swim in fearlessly, but panic is starting to well up in her throat, choke off her breath, and she doesn’t know if it’s hers or someone else’s. 

And that scares the shit out of her. Because that ocean is deep and dark and full of monsters and she doesn’t have a boat and she can’t remember how to swim.

In the darkness, she fishes her phone out of her pocket and turns the screen so the glow won't wake up Clint. She scrolls through her contacts, and finds the one she's looking for, and hesitates for a second before sighing through her nose and thumbing Call.

The line rings four times before it's picked up, but it's three in the goddamn morning, so she expects as much. “It's me,” she says quietly. “Everything's fine, but I need to talk to you. Can you meet me somewhere?”

“Of course,” Steve says on the other end, sleep-rough but alert. “Tell me where and I'm on my way.”

**oOoOoOo**

She doesn't want to be far from Clint, so Toni settles on a small family waiting suite just down the hall from his room. Extrication from his grasp without waking him up is something of a challenge, because the man has the hold of an octopus, but she manages to free herself with minimal fuss. 

She pauses after she's on her own two feet again, staring down at him with something strange and immense and deep swimming around in her chest. In the dark of the room, illuminated only by the low light creeping in from the hall beyond the ajar door. It’s cliche as hell, but true in this case: he looks younger, more innocent, sound asleep as he is. He’s replaced her in his embrace with the pillow she’d been lying on, face buried in it and clutched tight to his chest. 

She hesitantly reaches out, brushes through the spiky hair crunched into his own pillow, lets her fingertips ghost down over his forehead, tracing the curve of his nose. A sigh breathes out of him, light and faint, and his mouth curves into a smile. 

“Toni,” he murmurs, and burrows deeper into the pillow. 

“You’re gonna be the death of me,” she says softly, and leans in to press a light kiss onto his forehead. There are three words dancing on the tip of her tongue, but she bites them back. They’re too new, too uncertain, and she’s not sure if she means them yet, not like they’d sound. 

Before she can convince herself to just crawl back into bed with him and go to sleep again, she sighs and quietly slips out of the room.

Two steps outside the door, she pulls up short at the sight of the hawk, Clint’s hawk, perched on a stray IV stand near the door across the hall, staring at her. She stops dead, stares at it as it stares at her. “Come on then,” she says softly, and holds out an arm.

The hawk eyes her unblinkingly for another moment. Then, with a single downsweep of its wings, launches itself into the air from the IV stand, and back-wings as it hits her upheld arm, then walks up to her shoulder. It ruffles its wing feathers, and makes a chastising noise at her.

“Yeah yeah,” she mutters, reaching up with her free arm to stroke her fingertips down the soft feathers of its chest, shuddering at the burst of warmth and solidity that breaks through her when she touches the hawk. “I should have done this months ago.”

The hawk makes another noise, this time sounding satisfied, and begins nibbling at the strands of her hair, gently rearranging them to its liking.

“You are not building a nest up there,” she says firmly, checking the knob for the family waiting room and finding it unlocked. She taps gently as she opens the door, peering cautiously around it in case it's occupied. It's not, so she slips in and all but collapses into the armchair nearest the door to wait for Steve. “Don't get any funny ideas about moving in.”

The hawk chirps, and it sounds like chiding. Then it goes back to ruffling through her hair with gentle tugs of its beak.

\----

A hand on her shoulder brings Toni out of her doze, and she jolts awake, displacing the hawk and nearly knocking her coffee out of Steve’s hand.  _ Thank God for supersoldiers, _ she thinks, because his inhumanly graceful twists and impossible reflex speed are the only things that save her life-giving caffeine from being dumped all over the floor. 

He steadies her as she shakily scrubs at her face. “Are you okay, Toni?” he asks, sitting beside her and handing over her coffee when she decides she’s stable enough to take it from him. “You look rattled.”

She pops the tab open on the coffee and takes a long, careful sip as she considers how to answer. Part of her wants to brush off his concern, the part of her that’s always looking to deflect attention from her weaknesses and injuries. Another part of her, a deeper and more exhausted part, is just pleading with her to tell the fucking truth for once. 

She sighs, sets the coffee cup aside, and pushes her hands through her hair. “I don’t know, Steve,” she says tiredly, turns to look him in the eye instead of avoiding eye contact like she usually does. “And I don’t know how to even begin figuring that out.”

“I thought as much,” he says with compassion, and gently squeezes her shoulder where his hand is still resting on it. “If you’re reaching out for help or advice, it must be bad.”

She closes her eyes, shakes her head, opens her eyes again. “No,” she replies. “Not bad. Just…” She looks for the right word for a few moments, then gives up with a helpless shrug when it eludes her. “I just don’t know, Steve.”

He looks thoughtful, pensive even, but he leaves his hand on her shoulder, moving in small circles that should be irritating but instead is just comforting. “If I had to take a stab in the dark,” he says slowly, “I’d say you were just coming into your Guide abilities and didn’t know how to handle it.”

She laughs, because she can’t help it. She can understand how he’d reach that conclusion, but he’s so far off base it’s hilarious to her. “No,” she manages to say in between chuckles, and reaches absently to stroke the hawk’s feathers again. The warmth soothes and settles her, smooths out the edges of the laughter and calms it down. “No, I manifested all that stuff pretty early. As far as Guides go, I’m pretty much fully trained, Steve.”

He frowns a little. “Then why…?” He blinks and pales. “Trauma. Something happened to you.” A beat, then a tentative, “Afghanistan?”

For a moment, she's too shocked to do anything but stare mutely at him. No one's ever put it together, except Rhodey, maybe Coulson. And neither of them put it together so quickly. “How did you…”

“I was a Guide in a bad war, Toni. I've seen it happen to both Sentinels and Guides. We called it  _ sense-lost _ back then. I understand it's called Traumatic Bond-Dissociative Stress Disorder now.”

“I…” She doesn't know what to say or do. On her shoulder, the hawk croons and nestles under her hair, pressing against the side of her head. “I never had a name for it,” she says, thick and slow. “I just thought I was broken.”

“That's a common misconception.” Steve's smile is gentle and compassionate, and maybe he's doing some Guide shit to her again, and maybe it's her own returning Guide shit clueing her in, but the comfort and support fairly boils off him and into her personal space. To her horror, she feels tears surging like lava, hot and fast and painful, spilling onto her cheeks without her permission.

Something cold and wet nudges her hand, tosses it up a few inches and a furry head wedges itself under her palm. She starts and looks down to find a dog, shimmering in that way she associates with spirit animals, staring up at her from where it has its muzzle on her knee, all soulful blue eyes and wagging tail and adorable face.

She’d know whose it was on sight, even without the supersoldier sitting next to her giving her the exact same look.

“Figures you’d be a dog,” she mutters, wiping tears away from her face with the heel of her hand. “Loyal, group-oriented, can’t stay mad at them, eats everything in the house.”

“I burn four times the calories of an unenhanced man my size,” Steve says mildly, and Toni’s not sure, but she thinks there’s a hint of a teasing tone in there somewhere. “It’s not my fault you didn’t buy enough groceries.” He drops his hand off her shoulder in favor of taking her free hand between his palms. “But we’re avoiding topics now, and sooner or later, it’s not going to be so quiet around here. So tell me, Toni. What do you need?”

“Advice, mostly.” She knows it’s just the spirit animals crowding into her, but it feels like old wounds are starting to close. It’s a strange sensation. “I just don’t know how to ask what I want to ask.”

He nods a little, looking thoughtful again. “Okay. How about I ask something then?” At her gesture to go ahead, he says, “Why come to me? Don’t get me wrong, Toni, I really don’t mind and I’m glad you called. But I’ve never been your first choice for anything. I’m surprised, is all, you chose to reach out to me instead of Rhodes. He’s a Guide too, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but Rhodey is…”  _ My brother. Too close. Too insightful for my peace of mind. Someone I don’t listen to enough. Someone who knows me too well.   _ Somehow, none of that conveys enough information for Steve to understand. “Well, he’s not you,” she says, changing tacks. “I’ll be blunt, Steve. Howard wasn’t expecting me to be a Guide. Starks are Sentinels made of iron. Always. When I manifested….” She shakes her head. “Let’s just say that Captain America wasn’t just a guy on a poster I put on my wall. He was the gold standard to which I was held as a Guide.”

He blinks, and his eyes widen a little. “That’s hardly fair,” he says, and somewhere in the back of her head where the old scars she gained as a child lurk, she feels a sense of gratitude so strong it almost hurts. “I wasn’t much of a Guide before the serum, Toni. I’m pretty sure that was the deciding factor in them choosing me. They wanted to see if it would enhance those abilities as well, but didn’t want to risk any of their military pairs.”

“That’s certainly not in any history book.” She shakes her head, and earns a painless nip on the ear for dislodging the hawk from his perch. She glares at it as she rubs her ear. “How did you deal with it? The surge of everyone around you?”

He grins, sudden and rueful. “I chased a Nazi down the street in my bare feet without a shirt, ripped a door off a taxi to use as a shield, and ended up diving into the Hudson.”

It’s such a ridiculous image,  and yet she can picture it so well, she can’t help but break into a peal of delighted laughter. “And they say I’m dramatic,” she says, looks down as the dog nudges her hand higher on its head. “I don’t suppose I’m handling this whole… bond well.” She sighs. “Clint deserves a better Guide.”

“He has the Guide he deserves,” Steve says firmly. “You’re not broken. You’ve been through hell, Toni, and it affected you, but you aren’t broken. You can get through this.”

She snorts. “It’s been over four years, Steven. If it was going to happen, it would have happened by now.”

He shrugs. “It doesn’t just happen, Antonia. It’s a process, and you have to be an active participant in it.” He tilts his head curiously. “I know you were affiliated with SHIELD in some fashion. Didn’t anyone offer treatment and therapy when you came back from Afghanistan?”

Her breath catches as a memory of Phil Coulson flashes into her thoughts. Agent, with his folders and perpetual half-smile. Agent, with his polite persistence he debrief her. Agent, offering her SHIELD resources if she needed them. Agent, with Loki’s spear through his chest and blood streaming from his mouth. 

She shuts her eyes tight as Steve’s face goes alarmed, and wrestles for control over the sudden squeeze of grief around her heart. “Maybe,” she manages to say. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Blessedly, Steve doesn’t press her on it, just nods and sits back against the cushions. “I’m not a trained therapist, Toni,” he says slowly, “but I’m here to help whatever way I can.”

“Tell me what to do,” she says, and for once in her life doesn’t mind the note of pleading in her voice. “I’m drowning, Steve. Tell me what to do.”

He inhales deeply, then blows out a noisy breath. “The recommended beginning point is to confront whatever caused the sense-loss to begin with,” he says. “Confront it and process it and work through it. It can be… an ugly process. Normally, you have someone trained in rehabilitation with you to help guide you through it. In this case, one of the SHIELD Healers, I imagine. Barring that, your bond partner, to keep you anchored and supported.”

She’s already shaking her head by the time he mentions SHIELD. “Not an option,” she says. “I don’t trust any of Fury’s people, and no way in hell am I dumping all this on Clint when he’s just hauled himself out of his own hellhole.” 

Steve frowns, unhappily. “I think you’re doing him a disservice,” he says. “He’d want to be there for you.”

“No,” she says, soft but firm. “He doesn’t know any of… why I’ve been rejecting everything for so long. And…” She hesitates, then sighs and throws caution to the wind, reaches for the truth. “Having him there… I wouldn’t focus on myself. He’d be an excuse to push my own shit aside for someone else.” Her mouth twists wryly. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, that’s what I’m best at.”

“Can’t change your mind, huh?”

“Sorry, Cap. Not even the soulful, disappointed eyes are gonna budge me on this one.”

“Well.” His sigh is not a sigh, but a determined,  _ that’s settled  _ sort of noise, and he squeezes her hand. “Nothing for it then. I’ll go with you.”

She blinks. “What?”

“Toni.” His smile is gentle and admonishing. “You can’t go alone. If you did, chances are you’d be lost permanently. This isn’t something you can power your way through without help. And if you don’t want Rhodey and you won’t talk to Clint, it’s going to have to be me.” 

“I thought you weren’t a trained therapist,” she says, eyeing him suspiciously. 

“I’m not. But I do have experience with it.” A significant pause. “First hand experience. I’ve been where you are, Toni. That’s how I know you can come back from it.”

“Says the supersoldier with super healing.” It’s out before she can bite it back, bitter and tired and beaten down, and she winces  as it finishes clearing her mouth. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Incredibly, all he does is laugh. “You’re stronger than I am,” he says. “No, don’t roll your eyes at me. You really are. I couldn’t bear the four weeks I spent dealing with  sense-loss. You’ve been doing it for four years.” He shakes his head in wonder. “I didn’t think it was possible to do it that long. Not without… trying to do something permanent to end it.”

“Oh Jesus, Steve. You didn’t…”

He shakes his head. “No. A friend of mine. One of the Commandos.” He’s washed out, haunted, lost somewhere in the past for a moment, and then it passes. “I promised myself I wouldn’t let a friend, a teammate, get that low again if I could help it. And I can help you, Toni. I promise I can. Will you let me?”

For a long, terrifyingly uncertain moment, she hangs on the precipice. She wants to brush him off, reassure him everything’s fine, she doesn’t need help, and then sneak off to do everything by herself anyway. It’s what she knows, because she’s the only person she’s ever been able to rely on. But a deeper part, the exhausted, sick part of her, just wants someone to hold her hand and tell her everything’s going to work out in the end, even if it won’t be fast and it won’t be easy. 

“Yeah,” she says, sighs, and presses her hand into her face, scrubbing it as best she can.  “Yeah, Steve. I want you to help. I trust you.”

“Good.” He’s beaming like a kid on Christmas, pleased and satisfied. “When do you want to start?”

“No time like the present.” With some minor difficulty, she extricates herself from the warm crush of dog, bird and Cap and stands, brushing the wrinkles out of her pants with her palms. “The more time I have to think about it, the more time I have to talk myself out of it. Just let me go kiss my dumbass Sentinel and we can go.”

He doesn’t question, doesn’t argue, doesn’t try to convince her to spill everything out to Clint like she thought he might. He just nods and stands as well, and she glowers at him because now she has to crane her neck to look up at him. “Whenever you’re ready. Where do you want to do this?”

“Afghanistan.” She really doesn’t want to do it anywhere, let alone her own personal purgatory, but she has a feeling that, if she’s going to get through this anywhere, it’s going to have to be where it all started. “I’m going to go slither back into the hole I crawled out of, and see if I can’t leave behind all this baggage I hauled out with me.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Warnings Apply**. A pretty overt revelation about what happened to Toni in Afghanistan in Rhodey and Clint’s conversation.

As hard as it was to initiate a bond with him, Toni finds it ridiculously hard to leave Clint. As Steve waits patiently by the door, Toni stares down at her sleeping Sentinel, like she hasn’t already memorized his face or the way his eyelashes smudge his cheeks when his eyes are closed. She bites her lip and strokes her fingertips through the ends of his hair, barely disturbing the strands, smiling like a goddamn idiot at the way he mumbles and nuzzles deeper into her pillow.

“Wish I didn’t have to go,” she says softly and lets her palm brush across his forehead. “But it’s one of those things I can’t put off any longer. Wouldn’t be fair to me or to you, so if you’re gonna yell, yell at me when I get back. We’ll talk about everything then.”

Before she can convince herself to crawl back into his arms and pretend everything’s fine, she bends over, holding her hair back, and kisses him gently, then straightens up and hurries towards the door, forcing herself not to look back. If she looks back, she isn’t going to leave. 

Steve, sympathy clear on his face, holds the door for her and she passes under his arm back out into the hall. “It’s rough, walking away,” he says, and drops his hand to squeeze her shoulder briefly, letting the door swing closed. “Even if it’s only for a little while, separation from your bond-partner is always hard.”

Toni sighs, scrubs her face, drags her fingers through her hair, all the fidgety gestures she usually makes to feel herself better that are now only serving to make her more anxious. Or maybe it’s the feeling of the hospital patients and visitors around her, surging and ebbing around the edges of her mind. “I suppose it doesn’t help that it’s barely a few hours old,” she mutters. 

“Or that you haven’t had any sleep in God only knows how long,” Steve adds, gives her a smile at the dirty look she sends his way. “You’ll be fine, Toni. I think you’ve made a good choice in deciding to deal with this now.”

“I’m surprised you’re not trying to convince me to wake Clint up and take him along.” She sighs again, rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands, then looks up at him when he just chuckles. 

“I tried that,” he says with a what-can-you-do smile and shrug. “You were pretty clear with your stance on the issue. No point in arguing until we’re both blue in the face when you’re not going to change your mind and digging my heels in might mean you sneak off to try doing this by yourself. I don’t need you in the hospital or worse, in the ground, just to win an argument.”

Toni swallows hard, and glances left as a ruffle of feathers catches her attention. The hawk stares at her from atop the same IV stand it had watched her from before, and Toni’s shoulders slump. “Am I being stupid about this?” She isn’t sure if she’s asking Steve or the hawk. 

Steve’s the one who answers her. “Maybe,” he says. “I don’t think he’s going to react well when he wakes up and you’re not there. He’s certainly not going to react well to you having skipped town with another person.” He raises his hands abruptly as Toni looks sharply at him. “I’m not judging, I promise.”

Toni, with effort, relaxes her shoulders and holds an arm out for the hawk, who hops from the IV stand to her forearm with a single downsweep of its wings. “No,” she says softly, stroking her fingers along the underside of the hawk’s throat feathers. The hawk blinks one big golden eye at her and clicks its beak irritatedly. Toni eyes it back, then lowers her arm until it climbs to her shoulder. “He probably won’t take it well. And maybe it’s not fair of me to sneak out in the middle of the night with you, but it wouldn’t be fair of me to dump it all on him either.”

“Nothing about this is fair,” Steve replies. “All you can do is what you think is for the best.”

She bites her lip, reaches up to run her fingers over the hawk’s feathers again, and feels the warm centerpoint of the bond throb in her chest. “What if it isn’t the right thing?”

Steve smiles a little ruefully. “That’s part of doing what you think is right. Sometimes you’re wrong, and you have to deal with the consequences.”

“You’re not making this easier.” Toni sighs and scrubs the back of her head with both hands. “You’re also not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“We haven’t gone anywhere yet,” Steve says softly, after a minute when they haven’t moved anywhere. “You can still turn around and get him.”

The thought is far more tempting than it should be. “No,” Toni says, regretful but final, and starts moving with a certainty she isn’t feeling. “Let him sleep. He needs it more than I need him right now.”

She’s lying through her teeth. She knows it. She knows Steve knows it. But neither of them call her on the falsehood as they move through the halls and corridors splashed with early-morning light, and unease nibbles at her stomach. 

“I’ll call Rhodey,” she says finally, as they wait for the elevator to arrive at their floor, and purposefully does not look at Steve. “He’ll be willing to check up on Clint for me, I’m sure.”

The muzzy reflection of Steve in the dull metal of the elevator doors nods and Toni busies herself fishing her cell phone out of her pocket, so she doesn’t have to look at either Steve or the hawk on her shoulder. She’s got a hole to crawl into, and back out of again. 

**oOoOoOo**

For the first time in longer than he can remember, Clint wakes up with his world in its proper place. Nothing screams at him, no color sharpens until it's almost too painful to look at. There aren’t any sounds drowning out the rest of the murmur around him. He doesn’t have to fight for focus, wrestle clarity out of chaos. 

Everything is sharp and sweet and crisp around him, without pain, without cacophony, without madness. 

He's smiling as he comes out of sleep, wrapped in the scent of Toni and reaching for her before he can properly process that the other side of the bed is empty and cold. 

Unease begins to gnaw at his stomach as he sits up and cracks open eyes that feel crusty and dry, rubbing impatiently at them to clear out the crud. His other senses work just fine, however, and before the blurriness has left his vision, he extends them in search of his missing Guide.

The unease churns into the first lurches of nausea when he realizes she’s nowhere near him, and hasn’t been for at least an hour.

He slides out of bed in the darkened room, pads to where someone — probably Nat — hung his jacket over the back of a chair, and slides his phone out from its inner pocket. No texts from Toni, no voicemail icon showing he has a message waiting. He ransacks the room, moving from jacket to clothing to drawers to even checking under the bed, but he finds no note from Toni, nothing to indicate where she might have gone. 

A lump chokes his throat, and he swallows hard in an attempt to dislodge it, staring mutely at the rumpled sheets of the hospital bed where, an hour ago, he’d been the happiest fucking guy on the planet because _his Guide had chosen him after all_. He doesn’t want to think it had all been a lie, but he has difficulty dismissing the notion once it occurs to him.

Toni’s been running from him since the moment they met. Why should running from him after their initial bond surprise him?

The case of his phone creaks in his hand, and he glances down to see his fingers have gone white-knuckle tight around it. He unclenches them with effort and, though there’s a tiny voice at the back of his head laughing cruelly at him, he swipes open his phone and finds Toni’s number in his contacts list.

He closes his eyes as he lifts the phone to his ear, swallows again as he listens to it ring, feels his heart sinking as her voice chirps out her voicemail greeting after four rings. The fact that the ringing was a full four tones and didn’t cut over early to her voicemail is cold comfort. He might have almost preferred she actively declined to talk to him instead of just not picking up the phone at all.

Dread and panic duel in the pit of his stomach as the greeting finishes and the beep indicates it’s now recording any message he wishes to leave. “Don’t do this to me, Toni,” he says, suddenly and deeply _hates_ how strangled and strained he sounds, presses buttons until he finds the option to delete the message, and ends the call without leaving a new one. 

He tosses the phone onto the table beside the bed, and sinks onto the edge of the thin mattress, scrubbing his face slowly with both hands as he tries to process his way through this. 

He can still feel her, a vibrant tangle of endless compassion and deep wells of empathy threading through his thoughts, and he’s not sure whether that’s a good sign or a bad one. He prods the knot tentatively, but if he’s supposed to be able to suss anything of her location or situation or inner thoughts out of it, he has no idea how.

A soft chirp pulls his attention up from the palms of his hands, and he stares blankly at the tiny ball of red and gold feathers for a moment before he identifies it as Toni’s hummingbird. He blinks, and it hops across the window ledge before launching itself to hover in the air before his nose, and makes a series of cheeps and chirps that sound for all the world like it’s scolding him.

Anger rises in him then, choking and deeply hurt, surges through the panic and confusion and doubt with a breathtaking swiftness, and his teeth clench. “Go the fuck away,” he tells it in a low, venomous hiss.

He’s a little taken aback by his own vehemence, but the hummingbird appears unfazed as it darts left and right, like it’s considering him from different angles, before it starts up with another noisy round of chiding. 

“She left me,” he snarls. “She got me out, she got me stable, and then she got herself gone. Go with her. She’s who you belong to.”

It’s absolutely his imagination, his pathetic distressed longing for his Guide, but he’d swear the hummingbird gives him the exact same withering look he’s seen on Toni’s face when encountering someone who particularly taxes her tolerance for dumbassery. It chirps once more, definitely scoffing at him, and then darts around his cheek too fast for him to do more than begin to think swatting at. 

He sighs, shoulders slumping, as the hummingbird bounces across the breadth of his shoulders and tucks itself in the dip of his collarbone, hunching against his neck with a happy cheep.

“Fine,” he grumbles, and throws himself sullenly back against the pillows to glare at the ceiling and try to convince himself he’s going to be just fine without her. “Do whatever you want. Your person’s good at doing that. I don’t know why you’d be any different.”

The hummingbird doesn’t reply to that, but he can still feel it against his skin, and despite himself, he brings a hand up to cup it gently, stroke its feathers with a fingertip. He wishes he didn’t feel a little better with it pressed into his skin, but he’d be lying to himself if he did. 

He doesn’t mean to, but the exhaustion creeps up on him, and he drifts off with the hummingbird snoring against his throat and his palm curved gently around it like a blanket.

**oOoOoOo**

It’s ass o’clock in the morning, and he’s been forcibly rolled out of bed by Natasha’s foot for answering a call she warned him to let go to voicemail if he knew what was good for him. Despite the inauspicious start to his day, Rhodey hasn’t been in this good a mood in a long, long time. He knows he’s going to pay for this later, because Natasha was quite clear in her descriptions of how he would do so, but it’s a cost he’ll happily accept.

Toni so rarely gives him chances to meddle in her life, and he’s not the fool who passes on the stunningly broad and beautiful opportunity she’s just served him on a silver goddamn platter.

The sun’s barely up in the sky, and it’s definitely well before established visiting hours, but no one stops Rhodey as he makes his way through the wing, two coffees in a takeaway tray in one hand, bag of Clint’s clothes Natasha grudgingly shoved at him in the other. It takes a bit for him to find the room in the labyrinthine layout of the wing, but he manages to locate it with a minimum of fuss. He even manages to do so without drawing active scrutiny from any of the nurses at stations and doing early-morning bloodwork and vitals checks who might take umbrage at his presence at an ungodly hour of the morning.

Clint’s a vaguely humanoid shape huddled under the blanket on the bed when he quietly slips into the room. Rhodey pauses for a moment, studying him from the distance afforded by the doorway, then crosses the floor quietly to set the coffee on the table and the bag on the seat of the chair.

He is not for one second of the impression that Clint is asleep, and is entirely unsurprised when he turns to find Clint’s eyes open, staring at him silently, gaze steady and expression cold.

“Rise and shine, Barton,” he says without missing a beat, and pulls the appropriate coffee cup out of the cardboard tray to offer it out to him. “I bring coffee and clean clothes.” He pauses, then adds, “I can guarantee the quality of the coffee. I got it from my favourite cafe. I can’t guarantee the compatibility of the items in the bag, however. Natasha packed it, and she’s kinda pissed at you, man.”

He doesn’t need Guide gifts to read Clint’s mood, but it’s always nice to have confirmation of his very educated guesses. Mulish, stubborn, hurt and stewing. Soupçon of betrayal, overwhelming anxiety churning just under the surface of his chilly fury. Rhodey resists the urge to sigh as he continues to hold the cup invitingly out while Clint stares at it and him like he’s offering a live viper.

“Thanks,” Clint mutters, finally reaching out to take the cup from him, and Rhodey sinks into the other chair as he frees his own cup from the tray and re-caffeinates as Clint works his way through his.

Rhodey does not miss the tight ball of red fluff curled under Clint’s jaw, and a lump rises in his throat. He has swallow and clear his throat several times to rid himself of it. “Was starting to wonder if I’d ever see Toni’s spirit animal again,” he says softly to Clint’s flint-eyed death stare over the top of his cup. “I kinda missed that hyperactive pompom.”

Clint’s eyes flicker. “Don’t suppose you could take it with you when you leave,” he says, even and calm. Sips his coffee without dropping eye contact. 

Rhodey feels that surge of anger and confusion and hurt push out against him again, and sighs inwardly. “No,” he says. “And I wouldn’t, even if I could.” He winces as the anger rises to sharp, icy razor-sharpness, and takes a moment to strengthen his shielding. “Christ, Barton. I’m not your enemy here.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Clint mutters, and his eyes finally drop from Rhodey’s. “Does she always send you to clean up her messes and throw out her discards?”

He’s hurting, Rhodey knows that, and he can’t even say that Clint’s wrong to be hurt and upset, and for a moment he desperately wants to reach out through space and time and shake the living shit out of Toni for putting him in this spot with her Sentinel. But he can’t say Toni’s wrong to do as she’s doing either — disagree though he might with her methods, the reasoning had been sound. “It’s not like that, Clint,” he starts, but Clint cuts him off with a harsh, bitter, humorless laugh.

“Sometimes broken people aren't worth fixing.” Clint's eyes are furious, bigger, mortally wounded. “That's what she said. To my face. So you tell me, Rhodes. What the fuck other way am I supposed to realize it’s like?”

Rhodey closes his eyes, presses his fingertips hard against his forehead, trying to stave off the headache he can feel percolating in his skull. “She wasn't referring to you, man,” he says quietly. “She was talking about herself.”

There's a long silence, but Rhodey doesn't want to open his eyes. He doesn't need to. He knows what he's going to see on Clint's face, knows the evolution of emotions most likely to be manifesting and fading in succession. Suspicion, confusion, puzzlement, contemplation, concentration, and finally the soul-sucking horror of realization. 

“Oh _fuck me,_ ” Clint says, faint and strangled and horrified. “Afghanistan.”

“Afghanistan.” Rhodey heaves a sigh so heavy it leeches his desire to keep standing, and he sinks into an armchair and scrubs his face with one hand. “I wish like hell it had never happened. I wish like hell I didn't know the specifics. But she was a wreck when I found her, projecting all over the place like she was a rank beginner. I knew, and she knew I knew. It's the only reason she ever agreed to talk to someone. Because I knew what they did. I knew how hard she tried to stop them. How there were too many, and she couldn't stop feeling what they were, couldn't stop it from bleeding into her thoughts.”

“Stop,” Clint says in a horrible, hollow, toneless voice.

“No. Cos she won't tell you and you'll put your foot in your goddamn mouth again if you don't know.” He snaps his mouth shut, reaches for centering techniques to haul back the feral rage and terror, breathes deep and slow. “When they hurt her,” he says, deliberate and slow, because it's the only way the words won't make him choke and retch, “she could feel how much they were enjoying it. After awhile, she didn't know if it was their enjoyment or hers any longer. That's when she shut it all down, locked her empathy away, forced it into a cage and lost the key. That's when she decided she wasn't a Guide anymore. That no Sentinel should be stuck with her, forced to endure her disability. That's when she started referring to herself as broken.”

Clint makes a sound, something awful and pained. Rhodey feels for the guy, he really does, but none of that matters in the face of the fact that he needs to know. “Where is she?”

Rhodey lifts his head, meets Clint's pale, horrified gaze; shrugs tiredly. “You’re her bonded Sentinel,” he says, and can’t quite keep the bitterness, the anger or the disappointment from tinging his words anymore. “You tell me.” 

**oOoOoOo**

In hindsight, everything makes absolutely perfect sense. 

With the sort of clarity that only comes from knowledge, Clint sits on the windowsill, stares out the window, and reconsiders every single conclusion he’d ever leapt to, shines them in the new light so brutally provided to him by Rhodey. Every time Toni had looked agonized, every time she’d drawn away from him, that horrible, soul-crushing cruel argument they’d had after their encounter in the range.

He thought she’d been shoving him away because she thought he wasn’t good enough for him, and all this time, she’d been shoving him away because she thought she wasn’t going to do anything but destroy _him_. 

Shit, he’s a fucking moron. 

The hummingbird flits from the rolling bed-tray where it had been perched on the rim of his discarded fruit cup, face first into the remnants of the syrup, and alights on his knee to stare at him quizzically. He stares back at it for a moment, then sighs wryly and holds his hand out to gather it up.

“I should go find her,” he murmurs, stroking a fingertip over its feathers and smiling faintly as it makes a noise that he can only describe as a purr and its eyes shut. “Can I count on you to help me find her?”

It chirps once, and the sense of Toni woven through his thoughts strengthens, glows, in his mind’s eye. Just for a second, he sees through her eyes, sees the landing pad on top of Avengers’ Tower, sees Steve loading bags into a quinjet, feels the uncertainty and terror and determination in her. The drive to _fix herself_ , the deep desire to _be worth the trouble_.

And then he’s back in his own head, inhaling deeply and doing his best to keep his shit together. 

The hummingbird brushes his knuckle soothingly and chirps again, then zips into the air and hovers expectantly. He closes his eyes, swallows hard and pulls himself together. “Yeah,” he says, thick and low. “Yeah, you’re right. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Barton, and go get the girl.”

———

He’s pretty sure all his elite government training and inborn Sentinel powers weren’t actually meant to dodge around nurses and other hospital officials in the process of escaping their clutches, but they sure as hell do come in handy.

They also come in handy spotting all the various SHIELD agents that have been surreptitiously posted around the hospital, and irritation surges as he exits the hospital to find them. It might be the height of ego to think that they’re there for him, but he knows better. SHIELD can’t keep their hands off Sentinels and Guides, especially when there’s a whiff of a bonded pair in the air. 

He circles the exits once, picks out his most likeliest target, and waits for an opportunity to make his move. It doesn’t take long for Agent McKenna, comfortably ensconced in middle management and a notorious caffeine junkie, to abandon his post beside the SHIELD-issued motorcycle and head for the coffee cart on the corner. 

A quick glance to the left and right ensures that there aren’t any other agents in sight waiting to pounce on him. Bryant was at two, last he checked, and Ogawa at ten, but neither of them are in sight now as he slides out from the shelter of a half-wall. Eight long steps bring him to the edge of the curb, and another slides him onto the cycle.

He pauses only long enough to slip his smart sunglasses out of his pocket, settle them over his eyes, and orient on the barely-visible speck of red-and-gold down the street. McKenna’s yells of startled protest hit his ears a second after he revs the engine, and he pulls out into the flow of traffic before McKenna can do more than squawk ineffectually from the coffee cart behind him.

He’s halfway back to the Tower when the communications chip in his glasses flickers on and the highly unamused face of Director of SHIELD Phil Coulson forms in the HUD it spreads before his eyes. 

“Agent Barton,” Coulson begins, deceptively mild and friendly, the sort of tone he always starts with right before he begins chewing Clint’s ass for whatever stunt he pulled on his latest op. 

“Director Coulson,” Clint replies with patently false cheer, flicks his eyes back to the road in time to swerve around a decelerating taxi pulling to the curb. “Something I can do for you?”

Coulson’s eyes narrow ever so slightly. “You’re supposed to be in the hospital, Barton.”

“And when has that ever meant anything to me?” Clint replies, scanning ahead to check on the traffic patterns and recalculate his time along this route as necessary. “You’re supposed to be overseeing a secret team that flies around the world dealing with all the kiddie league bad guys who don’t rate the Avengers.” He grins when Coulson actually blinks. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s managed to put any sort of surprised expression on Coulson’s face. This makes number three. 

“I’m not even going to ask how you came into knowledge of files classified at level 8, Barton,” Coulson says with a faint, rueful smile.

“I have my ways.”

Coulson just nods. “Natasha. I thought so.”

It’s the truth, but Clint’s still stung a little. “I’m a perfectly good spy,” he protests, maybe whines just a little bit. He grits his teeth briefly, fights against the urge to shake his head clear. Bad idea when he’s driving a motorcycle in the middle of Midtown traffic with next to no care for the rules of the road. “I’m not going back to the hospital, no matter what perfectly logical arguments I’m sure you have ready.”

Coulson’s smile widens a little. “I heard you bonded.”

“Natasha’s got a big mouth,” he grumbles. 

“She worries,” Coulson returns mildly. “Can SHIELD help?”

Suddenly, Clint’s tired of the cat and mouse wordplay. He’s got better things to do than trade quippy one-liners and coy double meaning speeches. Especially with the guy who died to bring the Avengers together but hadn’t bothered telling the Avengers -- including him -- that he was actually still alive. “You could have helped four years ago when she came back from Afghanistan,” he snaps, all humor and casual tones gone. “You could have helped when I was mind-fucked last year.”

Coulson’s eyes crease in what Clint thinks might be his version of distress and regret. “I tried with Dr. Stark,” he says. “She refused treatment. We sent Agent Romanoff to monitor her condition. It was the best I could do at the time. And last year…” He breaks off, clears his throat, looks distinctly uncomfortable. 

“Last year you were dead.” There’s anger bubbling up in his chest from somewhere, deep and wide. “I think technically you still are.”

Coulson winces, but Clint’s past caring about scoring the points of flapping the unflappable man. “Save it, Coulson,” he says, short and sharp, attention going to the looming glitter of the unmistakeable Avenger Tower appearing in the skyline ahead of him. “Toni and I won’t need SHIELD’s help with our bond. We’re muddling along just fine on our own.”

Coulson shakes his head, sighs faintly, and his lips thin into a line of mild disapproval. “Clint,” he starts, and it’s a tone that sets Clint’s teeth on edge, because it’s the tone of someone trying to deal with an unreasonable person. 

“Toni doesn’t even know you’re alive, Phil,” he replies with a scowl he’s not actually sure Coulson can see, given the limitations of the HUD and most likely placement of the return camera. “Toni bawled her fucking eyes out when you died, and you didn’t feel it necessary to inform her you actually survived. So thanks, Director, but fuck you. We’re fine.”

Before Coulson can do more than open his mouth to reply, Clint pulls the glasses from his face, calculates the parabola and throws the glasses in an overhand arc that cracks them into the pavement a split second before the front wheel of his stolen bike crushes them into shards and fragments. 

He has a momentary pang of loss, and he glances back over his shoulder at the crushed remains. He liked those glasses, dammit, SHIELD issued or not. He sighs a wordless ah, well, and returns his attention to the road in front of him. He has to catch a quinjet before it takes off, and besides, he doesn’t need to mourn over broken toys. If he asks nicely, he’s sure Toni would be happy to make him a new, better pair. 


End file.
